Towards Agile Security Assurance

Agile development methods are promising to become the next generation replacing waterfall development. They could eventually replace the plan-driven methodologies not only in pure software solutions in such benign domains as word processing and office automation but also in security-critical projects with both software and hardware parts developed or integrated together. At the same time, the accepted practices for security assurance appear to go totally contrary to agile approaches. Can and how security assurance be adopted by agile developers? What needs to be done for the adoption to happen? This talk makes a first step toward answering these questions in a pursuit for agile security assurance. It first explains what computer and software security is and why it is hard. Then, it re-examines the conventional practices of security assurance to find out how well they suite agile development methodologies. It classifies security assurance methods and techniques with regards to their clash with agile development. For those in conflict, ways of alleviating it are suggested.