SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Understanding Security in the Software Development Lifecycle: A Holistic, Mixed-Methods Approach

随着软件现在几乎渗透到现代生活的方方面面，保护软件的安全被广泛认为是一个关键问题。尽管在识别软件中的缺陷以及开发工具、库和流程以在软件开发和维护期间检测和减轻这些缺陷方面做了大量工作，但安全问题仍然普遍存在。在现实环境中对现有工具和流程的有效性进行经验性评估的工作相对较少，几乎没有努力了解专业开发人员犯下安全错误的根本原因。这种知识的缺乏阻碍了安全编程技术的进步，这些技术可以有效地减少已部署软件中的安全错误数量。这项研究的重点是衡量和评估典型开发人员实施的保护软件的特定方法的有效性。通过将对工业发展实践的人类学观察与对工具和过程的实验评估相结合，该项目将在实践中确定改进软件安全性的新的或未得到重视的方法。该研究包括四种相互依赖的方法：通过长期嵌入合作的工业软件开发团队进行人类学观察；进行和分析作为准实验的安全编程竞赛的结果；受控实验室实验；以及分析开放源码软件构件。人类学的方法通过田野工作者的零距离观察和反思产生深刻的见解，而竞赛则说明了方法(语言、工具等)的差异。一个实质性的问题(在数量上和质量上)与成功或失败相关。这两种方法都将产生假说，然后可以通过受控的实验室实验以及额外的现场、竞赛和人工观察来检验这些假说。这种方法的组合充分利用了每种方法的优势，以最大化生态和内部有效性，提供了最好的机会来了解安全软件开发的真正原因并提供有效的指导。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

As software now pervades nearly every aspect of modern life, securing software is widely acknowledged as a critical problem. Although significant effort has gone into identifying flaws in software, as well as developing tools, libraries, and processes for detecting and mitigating these flaws during software development and maintenance, security problems remain pervasive. There has been comparatively little effort to empirically assess the effectiveness of existing tools and processes in realistic settings, and almost no effort to understand the root causes of professional developers making security errors. This lack of knowledge hinders the advancement of secure programming techniques that can effectively reduce the number of security bugs in deployed software. This research focuses on measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of particular approaches to securing software as carried out by typical developers. By combining anthropological observation of industrial development practice with experimental evaluation of tools and processes, this project will identify new or underappreciated approaches to improving software security in practice.The research includes four interdependent approaches: anthropological observation via long-term embedding in partner industrial software development teams; conducting and analyzing results from secure-programming contests that serve as quasi-experiments; controlled lab experiments; and analysis of open-source software artifacts. The anthropological approach produces deep insights through zero-proximity observation and reflection by fieldworkers, and competitions illuminate how differences in approach (language, tools, etc.) to a substantive problem correlate (quantitatively and qualitatively) with success or failure. Both of these approaches will generate hypotheses, which can then be tested via controlled lab experiments, as well as additional field, contest, and artifact observations. This combination of approaches leverages the strength of each in order to maximize both ecological and internal validity, offering the best chance to understand the real causes of (in)secure software development and offer effective guidance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.