Security Engineering, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 27Secure Systems Development

My own experience is that developers with a clean, expressive set of specific security requirements can build a very tight machine. They don't have to be security gurus, but they have to understand what they're trying to build and how it should work.

– RICK SMITH

When it comes to being slaves to fashion, American managers make adolescent girls look like rugged individualists.

– GEOFF NUNBERG

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.

– ARCHILOCHUS

27.1 Introduction

So far we've discussed a great variety of security applications, technologies and concerns. If you're a working engineer, manager or consultant, paid to build or maintain a system with some security assurance requirements, you will by now be looking for a systematic way to go about it. This brings us to such topics as risk analysis, system engineering methodology, and, finally, the secret sauce: how you manage a team to write secure code.

The secret is that there isn't actually a secret, whether sauce or anything else. Lots of people claim there is one and get religious fervour for the passion of the moment, from the Orange Book in the 1980s to Agile Development now. But the first take offered on this was the right one. In the 1960s Fred Brooks led the team on the world's first really large software project, the operating system for the IBM S/360 mainframe. In his classic book “The Mythical Man-Month” he describes all the problems they struggled with, and his ...