Microsoft To Teach Undergrads About Secure Computing

gcondon writes "The Register is reporting that Microsoft is teaming up with the University of Leeds to teach students how to write secure code. Given the sheer number of programming errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities, it probably makes sense to learn from the company that has tried them all." UndercoverBrotha points out that University of Leeds is one of several venues: "Microsoft is planning to offer 11-week courses at Universities around the world."

Update: 03/24 18:00 GMT by J : Another report worth reading is Writing Software Right, which requires a free but annoying registration at Technology Review. This regards automated methods of finding software errors (not security specifically). Sun's "Jackpot" is discussed, a lint that also "identifies general instances of good or bad programming."

And Microsoft's efforts in this field are explained as well -- the company "paid more than $60 million in 1999 to acquire Intrinsa, maker of a bug-finding tool called Prefix. The program, which sifts through huge swaths of code searching for patterns that match a defined list of common semantic errors, helped find thousands of mistakes in Windows and other Microsoft products." As a Microsoft QA person says, "Our challenge is to get our software to the point that people expect it to work instead of expecting it to fail."

Comments

Re:There's insight in the humor.

[arkanes]

Microsoft Press publishes one of the best books I've ever seen on writing secure code (called, suprisingly, Writing Secure Code, ISBN 0-7356-1588-8). It's written by 2 MS engineers. I'd say there certainly are people at MS who're very qualified to talk about security, and, hopefully, those will be the ones teaching the seminars.

The book talks a great deal about how having secure code is more than just the writing, especially in a corporate environment where you need to enforce standards on multiple programmers and have to deal with the pressures from marketing, etc. I think that, more than incompotent programmers, is what leads to the issues we see at MS.

Not Just Security

[spring]

Microsoft has a huge push going on in education. Campus reps, steep tool discounts, and curriculum suggestions to get Microsoft technology into undergrad and grad school course materials. Ask any CS professor what kind of contact they've had with Microsoft reps.

Java and Linux have become very large forces in education. Java has very nearly become the de facto teaching language, and Linux has become a popular instruction platform. Microsoft is trying very hard to counter this motion with C# and the .Net runtime.