66540153
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Melvin Conway, an eminent computer scientist and programmer, create Conway’s Law, which states: Organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Thus, a company with frontend, backend, and database teams might lean heavily towards three-tier architectures. The structure of the application developed will be determined, in large part, by the communication structure of the organization developing it. In short, form is a product of communication.
Now, let’s look at the fundamental concept of Conway’s Law applied to the organization itself. The traditional-but-insufficient waterfall development process has defined a specific communication structure for our application: Developers hand off to the quality assurance (QA) team for testing, QA hands off to the operations (Ops) team for deployment. The communication defined by this non-Agile process reinforces our flawed organizational structures, uncovering another example of Conway’s Law: Organizational structure is a product of process.
As the figure shown above illustrates, siloed organizational structures align with sequential processes, e.g., waterfall methodologies. The DevOps method of breaking down these silos to encourage free communication and constant collaboration is actually reinforcing Agile thinking. Seen in this light, DevOps is a natural evolution of Agile thinking, bringing operations and sustainment activities and staff into the Agile fold.
Every Thursday, the SEI Blog will publish a new blog post that will offer guidelines and practical advice to organizations seeking to adopt DevOps in practice. We welcome your feedback on this series, as well as suggestions for future content. Please leave feedback in the comments section below.
66396209
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to a soldier or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, since these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources. As part of the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), my research has focused on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading expensive (battery draining) computations to more powerful resources that can be accessed in the cloud, or for staging data particular to a mission. This blog post is the latest installment in a series on how my research uses tactical cloudlets as a strategy for providing infrastructure to support computation offload and data staging at the tactical edge.
66242827
submission
heidibrayer writes:
A DevOps approach must be specifically tailored to an organization, team, and project to reflect the business needs of the organization and the goals of the project.
Software developers focus on topics such as programming, architecture, and implementation of product features. The operations team, conversely, focuses on hosting, deployment, and system sustainment. All professionals naturally consider their area of expertise first and foremost when discussing a topic. For example, when discussing a new feature a developer may first think "How can I implement that in the existing code base?" whereas an operations engineer may initially consider "How could that affect the load on our servers?"
When an organization places operations engineers on a project team alongside developers, it ensures that both perspectives will equally influence the final product. This is a cultural declaration that in addition to dev-centric attributes (such as features, performance, and reusability), ops-centric quality attributes (such as deployability and maintainability) will be high-priority.
Likewise, if an organization wants security to be a first-class quality attribute, a team member with primary expertise in information security should be devoted to the project team.
Every Thursday, the SEI Blog will publish a new blog post that will offer guidelines and practical advice to organizations seeking to adopt DevOps.
We welcome your feedback on this series as well as suggestions for future content. Please leave feedback in the comments section below.
65866637
submission
heidibrayer writes:
In an era of sequestration and austerity, the federal government is seeking software reuse strategies that will allow them to move away from stove-piped development toward open, reusable architectures. The government is also motivated to explore reusable architectures for purposes beyond fiscal constraints: to leverage existing technology, curtail wasted effort, and increase capabilities rather than reinventing them. An open architecture in a software system adopts open standards that support a modular, loosely coupled, and highly cohesive system structure that includes the publication of key interfaces within the system and full design disclosure. One area where the Department of Defense (DoD) is concentrating on the development of service-oriented architectures and common technical frameworks is in the intelligence community, specifically the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E). As this blog post details, a team of researchers at the SEI Emerging Technology Center (ETC) and the Secure Coding Initiative in the SEI’s CERT Division, are working to help the government navigate these challenges in building the DI2E framework, which promotes reuse in building defense intelligence systems.
65655937
submission
heidibrayer writes:
When we verify a software program, we increase our confidence in its trustworthiness. We can be confident that the program will behave as it should and meet the requirements it was designed to fulfill. Verification is an ongoing process because software continuously undergoes change. While software is being created, developers upgrade and patch it, add new features, and fix known bugs. When software is being compiled, it evolves from program language statements to executable code. Even during runtime, software is transformed by just-in-time compilation. Following every such transformation, we need assurance that the change has not altered program behavior in some unintended way and that important correctness and security properties are preserved. The need to re-verify a program after every change presents a major challenge to practitioners—one that is central to our research. This blog post describes solutions that we are exploring to address that challenge and to raise the level of trust that verification provides.
As we strive to ease the burden of effort surrounding verification for practitioners, we attempt to answer this question:
How can we ensure that the amount of verification work is proportional to the size of the change, as opposed to the size of the system?
65417739
submission
heidibrayer writes:
With the rise of multi-core processors, concurrency has become increasingly common. The broader use of concurrency, however, has been accompanied by new challenges for programmers, who struggle to avoid race conditions and other concurrent memory access hazards when writing multi-threaded programs. The problem with concurrency is that many programmers have been trained to think sequentially, so when multiple threads execute concurrently, they struggle to visualize those threads executing in parallel. When two threads attempt to access the same unprotected region of memory concurrently (one reading, one writing) logical inconsistencies can arise in the program, which can yield security concerns that are hard to detect. The ongoing struggle with concurrent threads of execution has introduced a whole class of concurrency-related issues, from race conditions to deadlock. Developers need help writing concurrent code correctly. This post, the second in a series on concurrency analysis, introduces Clang Thread Safety Analysis, a tool that was developed as part of a collaboration between Google and and the Secure Coding Initiative in the SEI's CERT Division. Clang Thread Safety Analysis uses annotations to declare and enforce thread safety policies in C and C++ programs.
65230261
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Given that up to 70 percent of system errors are introduced during the design phase, stakeholders need a modeling language that will ensure both requirements enforcement during the development process and the correct implementation of these requirements. Previous work demonstrates that using the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) early in the development process not only helps detect design errors before implementation, but also supports implementation efforts and produces high-quality code. Our latest blog posts and a recent webinar have shown how AADL can identify potential design errors and avoid propagating them through the development process. Verified specifications, however, are still implemented manually. This manual process is labor intensive and error prone, and it introduces errors that might break previously verified assumptions and requirements. For these reasons, code production should be automated to preserve system specifications throughout the development process. This blog post summarizes different perspectives on research related to code generation from architecture models.
65113201
submission
heidibrayer writes:
While conducting the research that produced The CERT Oracle Coding Standard for Java, the Secure Coding Team in the SEI's CERT Division identified best coding practices that, if followed, would eliminate vulnerabilities and other defects in Java programs. Together with collaborators from other organizations, the team in 2013 published Java Coding Guidelines: 75 Recommendations for Reliable and Secure Programs. Now the CERT Division is making the content of the Java Coding Guidelines book available free online.
65044051
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Insider threat is the threat to organization’s critical assets posed by trusted individuals — including employees, contractors, and business partners — authorized to use the organization’s information technology systems. Insider threat programs within an organization help to manage the risks due to these threats through specific prevention, detection, and response practices and technologies. The National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM), which provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information, is considering proposed changes that would require contractors that engage with federal agencies, which process or access classified information, to establish insider threat programs. The proposed changes to the NISPOM were preceded by Executive Order 13587, Structural Reforms to Improve the Security of Classified Networks and the Responsible Sharing and Safeguarding of Classified Information. Signed by President Obama in September 2011, Executive Order 13587 requires federal agencies that operate or access classified computer networks to implement insider threat detection and prevention programs.
Since the passage of Executive Order 13587, the following key resources have been developed:
-The National Insider Threat Task Force developed minimum standards for implementing insider threat programs. These standards include a set of questions to help organizations conduct insider threat self-assessments.
-The Intelligence and National Security Alliance conducted research to determine the capabilities of existing insider threat programs
-The Intelligence Community Analyst-Private Sector Partnership Program developed a roadmap for insider threat programs.
CERT’s insider threat program training and certificate programs are based on the above resources as well as CERT’s own Insider Threat Workshop, common sense guidelines for mitigating insider threats, and in-depth experience and insights from helping organizations establish computer security incident response teams. As described in this blog post, researchers from the Insider Threat Center at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute are also developing an approach based on organizational patterns to help agencies and contractors systematically improve the capability of insider threat programs to protect against and mitigate attacks.
64733585
submission
heidibrayer writes:
More and more, suppliers of software-reliant systems are moving away from traditional waterfall development practices in favor of agile methods. As described in previous posts on this blog, agile methods are effective for shortening delivery cycles and managing costs. If the benefits of agile are to be realized effectively, however, personnel responsible for overseeing software acquisitions must be fluent in metrics used to monitor these programs. This blog post highlights the results of an effort by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute to create a reference for personnel who oversee software development acquisition for major systems built by developers applying agile methods. This post also presents seven categories for tracking agile metrics.
64489991
submission
heidibrayer writes:
As recent news attests, the rise of sociotechnical ecosystems (STE)—which, we define as a software system that engages a large and geographically-distributed community in a shared pursuit—allows us to work in a mind space and a data space that extends beyond anything that we could have imagined 20 or 30 years ago. STEs present opportunities for tackling problems that could not have even been approached previously because the needed experts and data are spread across multiple locations and distance. Since STEs can be complex and have many diverse stakeholders, a key challenge faced by those responsible for establishing and sustaining them is eliciting requirements to inform their development efforts. Yet stakeholders often have requirements that they are not aware of, so they do not specify them. Uncovering these unstated requirements can be hard and is not well-supported by traditional approaches to requirements elicitation. This blog post describes initial results of an effort by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute aimed at developing an approach for determining the unstated needs of stakeholders typical of large, diverse programs and especially STEs.
64288539
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Continuous delivery practices, popularized in Jez Humble’s 2010 book Continuous Delivery, enable rapid and reliable software system deployment by emphasizing the need for automated testing and building, as well as closer cooperation between developers and delivery teams. As part of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) focus on Agile software development, we have been researching ways to incorporate quality attributes into the short iterations common to Agile development. We know from existing SEI work on Attribute-Driven Design, Quality Attribute Workshops, and the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method that a focus on quality attributes prevents costly rework. Such a long-term perspective, however, can be hard to maintain in a high-tempo, Agile delivery model, which is why the SEI continues to recommend an architecture-centric engineering approach, regardless of the software methodology chosen. As part of our work in value-driven incremental delivery, we conducted exploratory interviews with teams in these high-tempo environments to characterize how they managed architectural quality attribute requirements (QARs). These requirements—such as performance, security, and availability—have a profound impact on system architecture and design, yet are often hard to divide, or slice, into the iteration-sized user stories common to iterative and incremental development. This difficulty typically exists because some attributes, such as performance, touch multiple parts of the system. This blog post summarizes the results of our research on slicing (refining) performance in two production software systems. We also examined the ratcheting (periodic increase of a specific response measure) of scenario components to allocate QAR work.
63900833
submission
heidibrayer writes:
In today’s systems it’s very hard to know where systems end and software begins. Software performs an integrating function in many systems, often serving as the glue interconnecting other system elements. We also find that many of the problems in software systems have their roots in systems engineering, which is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on how to design and manage complex systems over their life cycles. For that reason, staff at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) often conduct research in the systems engineering realm. Process frameworks, architecture development and evaluation methods, and metrics developed for software are routinely adapted and applied to systems. Better systems engineering supports better software development, and both support better acquisition project performance. This blog post, the latest in a series on this research, analyzes project performance based on systems engineering activities in the defense and non-defense industries.
63869473
submission
heidibrayer writes:
According to a 2013 report examining 25 years of vulnerabilities (from 1998 to 2012), buffer overflow causes 14 percent of software security vulnerabilities and 35 percent of critical vulnerabilities, making it the leading cause of software security vulnerabilities overall. As of July 2014, the TIOBE index indicates that the C programming language, which is the language most commonly associated with buffer overflows, is the most popular language with 17.1 percent of the market. Embedded systems, network stacks, networked applications, and high-performance computing rely heavily upon C. Embedded systems can be especially vulnerable to buffer overflows because many of them lack hardware memory management units. This blog post describes my research on the Secure Coding Initiative in the CERT Division of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute to create automated buffer overflow prevention.
63341863
submission
heidibrayer writes:
Organizations are continually fending off cyberattacks in one form or another. The 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, which included contributions from SEI researchers, tagged 2013 as "the year of the retailer breach." According to the report, 2013 also witnessed “a transition from geopolitical attacks to large-scale attacks on payment card systems.” To illustrate the trend, the report outlines a 12-month chronology of attacks, including a January “watering hole” attack on the Council on Foreign Relations website followed in February by targeted cyber-espionage attacks against The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The well-documented Target breach brought 2013 to a close with the theft of more than 40 million debit and credit card numbers. This blog post highlights a recent research effort to create a taxonomy that provides organizations a common language and set of terminology they can use to discuss, document, and mitigate operational cyber security risks.
