Designing security into software

When people talk about software security, they usually refer to security applications such as antivirus software, firewalls and intrusion detection systems. There is little emphasis on the security in the software itself. Therefore the thesis sets out to investigate if we can develop secure software in the first place. It first starts with a survey of the software security field, including the definition of software security, its current state and the research having been carried out in this aspect. Then the development processes of two products known for their security: Microsoft IIS 6.0 and Apache HTTP Web Server are examined. Although their approaches to tackle security are seemingly quite different, the analysis and comparisons identify they share a common framework to address the software security problem - designing security early into the software development lifecycle. In the end the thesis gives recommendations as to how to design security into software development process based upon the principles from the research and the actual practices from the two cases. Finally it describes other remaining open issues in this field.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Chang Tony

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Michael A. Cusumano.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35098

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35098