Building a Software Security Assurance Programme

Last night, I spoke at OWASP Ireland's meeting in Dublin about the previously discussed Software (Security) Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM).

My presentation defined what software assurance, and in particular software security assurance, are, and why they are needed for complex software quality aspects. I also discussed what a maturity model is and how SAMM fits in with other business, project management, IT and software development maturity models. Moving onto SAMM, we reviewed the structure and how it may be used in software development teams and businesses to measure the current capability, act as a benchmark and help in building out a software security assurance programme.

There's been some discussion about applying SAMM on the SAMM mailing list, but it was good to chat with other people about their experiences and ideas to help organisations build better (more secure) software. The evening continued with an interesting talk on Niall Jordan on "Evading SQL Injection Detection Through Encoding", and then off to the nearest (almost adjacent) pub for further lively discussion and debate.

Oh, and a reminder... the Ireland chapter have organised OWASP Ireland AppSec 2009 Conference on 10 September 2009. With two tracks of application security related presentations from excellent speakers, I think it's going to be well worth attending.