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Secure Programming Exams Launched
An anonymous reader writes "The SANS Software Security Institute, in conjunction with organizations such as Siemens, Symantec, Juniper, OWASP, and Virginia Tech, has announced a program for testing whether programmers know how to write secure code. The Secure Programming Skills Assessment is split into separate language families (C/C++, Java/J2EE, Perl/PHP, and ASP/.NET). Director of research Alan Paller says 'This assessment and certification program will help programmers learn what they don't know, and help organizations identify programmers who have solid security skills.' The pilot exam will be held in Washington DC in August, followed by a global rollout."
If only programmers had time enough to evaluate the code they written, and every now and then to refactor some parts. Every coder with a tight schedule will write anything that gets the manager ready-to-production-rubber-stamp and, if it turns out that it has a vulnerability, by the time it gets discovered either it is up to the maintenance team to fix or a new version of the software will already be out, so no fix will be necessary.
Big. On schedule. Bugless. Pick 2.
If the program you're writing is, say, /., it's important but not absolutely critical. If you're my bank, or you're paypal, or you're a health insurance provider, it's essential.
Do some work for an a business involving online purchasing, and ask your client their opinion.
Extremely important.Nobody looks good when their information is hacked. The main difference between the government and a corporation is a corporation can lose customers and die rather quickly.
Exactly. It's probably possible to find ways of making virtually anything "more secure". Generally security isn't my number 1 priority when developing applications, but then I'm not developing anything mission critical or handling extremely sensitive data. I know some people on here will always say they do put security first, but how many people truly think of how secure something is after completing it? Not many that I know of - it's usually a case of getting something done by a deadline and that's that.
In a desktop calculator application or a NES emulator, it's probably not too important.
In a web application that deals with customers' personal data, it is of the utmost importance.
Security is important: there's confidentiality that should be protected (think credit card numbers and other ID theft); systems should be available (downtime of a webshop or adserver costs revenue) but most important integrety of systems and data should be OK. Consider what happens when people break into a bank and start transfering money from random accounts. (People defacing webservers are small fry in this category.)
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
no VB =(
can we expect to see the answer keys posted to about 100 .ru sites in a week?
stuff |
How long will it take employers, head-hunters, and even some technical people, to realise this?
the answers for these exams will be on testking and other cheat sites. which will be great as it will then enable thousands of coders to be certified to write secure code, and we'll never have insecure code again. Soon the SAN SW Security Institute can make exams for bug-free code and perfect IT architecture. I'll get all those certs so everything I do will be perfect.
If you even have to ask then you don't fit my definition of a programmer anyways, or at the very least a prime example of what is wrong with our educational system.
I'm sure banks don't worry about security, or the insurance industry, or hospitals, or the oil industry, or the pharmaceuticals, or...etc.
Slowly, but surely, security of software is becoming more if an issue. That doesn't mean writing perfectly secure software -- but it does mean closing up some of the glaring holes. As this article points out, a ridiculously large amount of security flaws in web applications come down to failing to do very basic things like failing to do adequate input validation/filtering, which leaves you open to SQL injection, XSS attacks and all manner of other nastiness. Expecting perfect code for simple things like web apps is unreasonable. On the other hand, if we can educate more programmers on basic techniques for handling these very common sorts of errors then things will undoubtedly improve significantly on the security front. Ultimately we are moving toward software assurance, where developers provide certain assurances about their software to let clients know what they can expect. It's not a matter of assuring perfection, it's being able to state clearly what aspects you can be confident of. Being able to say that all user input gets filtered through specific validation and filtering function, for instance, is an example of assurance. That doesn't mean the filtering function is perfect, but guaranteeing that all input goes through it is a start - if you want to provide assurance of stronger security then you might provide assurances as to what types of attacks the filtering function will prevent, and so on. As security becomes more important, providing such assurance offers in contracts will be increasiongly valuable.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Security is a very fast paced field with new exploits coming out all the time. Are we going to require a refresher class every couple months to keep this cert?
;)) making it counter productive in the long run. People are lazy after all and I know for a fact that only a handful of people I graduated with are keeping there knowledge up to date.
I really think that things like this, although well intentioned and not a bad idea, will lull corps into a false sense of security (no pun intended
So, I predict in the future that we'll have a lot of people with this cert that'll have no clue because it has been so long since they got this cert.
I took the sample "C/C++" exam, making a point to respond quickly and not to consult any references (something I'd never do when actually programming) and I have to say I was singularly unimpressed. The emphasis wasn't on trying to teach good programming practices but rather on trying to fool the person taking the exam with tricky questions that have little if any relevance in actual programming.
For example, one question was basically making the point that sizeof is a compile time thing that cannot be used to, say, determine the size of a string buffer passed through a char * parameter. But rather than present the question in a straightforward fashion, they has this business of dividing one sizeof value by another - completely unnecessary and confusing. I got the question right but I could just as easily missed it because of the unnecessary complexity and still understood the underlying concept.
One I did miss (I got 8 out of 10 right, I think) was one about how to declare a pointer to a array of constant strings. The question was phrased so awkwardly that I got confused as to what theyactually wanted and gave the wrong answer even though I know how to get the effect they want.
I was also unimpressed that there was no feedback given as to why a given answer was correct or incorrect. No feedback is arguably fine if the intent is purely to assess skill levels, but the stated intent is that this "will help programmers learn what they don't know". You can't do that unless you also explain why a given answer is wrong. Perhaps this is merely an artifact of the sample exams, but if so the samples aren't very interesting.
If this sample exam is in any way representative I think there's a lot more work to be done before this will actually be useful.
We may start to see where zero day exploits really originate (implication: within the mother company). We may begin to see how much personal information is truly being gathered (implication: as much as possible). We may realize how long illegal domestic wiretaps have really been going on (implication: at least as long as the technology has been available).
In all actuality I see a certification like this to be good at heart to begin with but, give another five years, and it will become a method to ensure that programmers only make mistakes in predictable ways--and then everything will proceed as it currently is.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
They're worried about security, alright. If it's too open then outsiders can begin exploiting them. If it's too closed then they might get caught passing insider trading information. Security is one of those "just right" things in the eyes of big business.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
When a statement doesn't have parentheses you evaluate from left to right. :)
More Twoson than Cupertino
I agree. They have BrainBench syndrome: they take it upon themselves to judge others, yet clearly don't understand much of the subject themselves. You can tell this from the way the "C/C++" exam (as if security concerns are even close to the same in those two languages) focusses pretty much entirely on C library functions that most security-conscious programmers would avoid entirely, with a random concurrency question at the end. Strangely, it doesn't even reference ideas like using containers rather than raw strings/arrays in C++, avoiding fixed-size buffers and magic numbers in the first place, and other routine programming practices.
For the record, I scored only 7/10 according to them. This is odd, considering my experience. (I could name drop and list qualifications, but you can't verify them anyway, so for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that I'm technically competent and none of the answers I gave was actually wrong given my understanding of the question.)
The sample assessment report (PDF) that gives some headings for a C/C++ test is not reassuring, either.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... there is a buffer overflow vulnerability on question #9.
-m
If my paltry little text editor application has a minor buffer overflow flaw, then the user who exploits it gains...privileges as the user who was running the text editor. Oh noes!
It's only on operating systems with absolutely no concept of security where things like office suite macros can do any damage at all.
Vallllllllllldiiiiiiiisssssss!!!! The only person to post to more lists in one day than Gadi Evron!
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
If you write anything that can be accessed publicly, you are potentially risking the entirety of the machine it is running on, or worse. A poorly written "Hello World" program written in PHP pulling the string "Hello World" from a MySQL database could be enough to get the server pwn3d. If you don't understand the fundamentals of security in programming, you shouldn't be programming in an environment where your ignorance and lack of education can cause damage to a company.
I agree that most CS programs in the US don't teach security methods, nor do they teach the concept of vulnerability. How is a box pwned? How do you feed a program the right data to execute arbitrary commands? How can you test that? I know the CS program at the local Big 12 university in the city I live in sure as hell doesn't teach any of that.
Not that I disagree in general, but that sizeof idiom is one I use all the time to compute the number of elements in an array. The point of the question is that this doesn't work for arrays passed as arguments to a function.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
From the title I thought they were talking about preventing cheating on online exams... Unfortunately, since they're not, I doubt we'll be able to take the secure programming exam online securely any time soon.
for secure programming. But that not unusual. In fact that seems to be the Zeitgeist.
./ article of mine on secure programming without me mention that Ada [2] is well suited for secure programming and since PHP was mentioned: How about using the Ada Web Server [3] for truly secure your web applications? Yes, it will take longer to program for the AWS then quickly hacking together a PHP application. But the bitter truth is: quick hacking and secure programming are mutually exclusive.
8 589&cid=18530047a ries/Web/AWS
Everybody speaks of secure programming but allays in combinations with unsuitable tools and programming languages.
Reminds me a bit about the Addams Family. Remember the part where Gomez tries to make huge loss of money. In the end he start a venture in Chocolate-Diet - something he things will never work as chocolate is completely unsuitable for diet purpose and his hope is that people won't fall for such a stupid idea - hence he is going to loose money on the venture.
Of course we now how it ended: Chocolate-Diet was a huge success! He made tons of extra cash. Because people love to go the easy way - even when it is blatantly clear that it won't work.
And the same here: Instead of going to the pains of learning a programming language and/or tools suitable for secure programming you just go or be send my management to take a silly test [1]. Only difference: Unlike Gomez Addams the "Software Security Institute" knows very well how people (and especially managers with little technical knowledge) work and that there "Chocolate-Diet" will bring in the cash.
Of course no
Martin
[1] http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=22
[2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming
[3] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Libr