Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

Independent verification and validation (IV&V) is a significant step in the process of deploying systems for mission-critical applications in the Department of Defense (DoD). In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Justin Smith, senior Agile transformation leader in the SEI Software Solutions Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about how to bring concepts from Lean and Agile software development into the practice of IV&V. Smith describes his experiences at NASA's Katherine Johnson IV&V Facility as a project manager for the Orion IV&V team. On that project, the developer employed Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as their development process, which had challenging consequences for established IV&V practices within NASA IV&V. Smith also discusses the ways in which NASA adapted to this change and describes strategies and tactics for reconciling Agile and IV&V.

Zero trust architecture has the potential to improve an enterprise's security posture. There is still considerable uncertainty about the zero trust transformation process, however, as well as how zero trust architecture will ultimately appear in practice. Recent executive orders have accelerated the timeline for zero trust adoption in the federal sector, and many private-sector organizations are following suit. Researchers in the CERT Division at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) hosted Zero Trust Industry Days to enable industry stakeholders to share information about implementing zero trust. In this SEI podcast, CERT researchers Matthew Nicolai and Nathaniel Richmond discuss five zero trust best practices identified during the two-day event, explain their significance, and provide commentary and analysis on ways to empower your organization's zero trust transformation.

In Ansible, roles allow system administrators to automate the loading of certain variables, tasks, files, templates, and handlers based on a known file structure. Grouping content by roles allows for easy sharing and reuse. When developing roles, users must deal with various concerns, including what operating system(s) and version(s) will be supported and whether a single node or a cluster of machines is needed. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Matthew Heckathorn, an integration engineer with the SEI's CERT Division, offers guidance for systems engineers, system administrators, and others on developing Ansible roles and automating infrastructure as code.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Gregory J. Touhill, director of the SEI CERT Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about the 2020 attack on Solar Winds software and how to prevent a recurrence of another major attack on key systems that are in widespread use. Solar Winds is the name of a company that provided software to the U.S. federal government. In late 2020, news surfaced about a cyberattack that had already been underway for several months and that had reportedly compromised 250 government agencies, including the Treasury Department, the State Department, and nuclear research labs. In addition to compromising data, the attack resulted in financial losses of more than $90 million and was probably one of the most dangerous modern attacks on software and software-based businesses and government agencies in the recent past. The SolarWinds incident demonstrated the challenges of securing systems when they are the product of complex supply chains. In this podcast, Touhill discusses topics including the need for systems to be secure by design and secure by default, the importance of transparency in the reporting of vulnerabilities and anomalous system behavior, the CERT Acquisition Security Framework, the need to secure data across a wide range of disparate devices and systems, and tactics and strategies for individuals and organizations to safeguard their data and the systems they rely on daily.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Marisa Midler and Samantha Chaves, penetration testers with the SEI's CERT Division, talk with Suzanne Miller about a penetration-testing repository that they helped to build. The repository is a source of information for active directory, phishing, mobile technology, systems and services, web applications, and mobile- and wireless-technology weaknesses that could be discovered during a penetration test. The repository is intended to help assessors provide reports to organizations using standardized language and standardized names for findings, and to save assessors time on report generation by having descriptions, standard remediations, and other resources available in the repository for their use. The repository is available at https://github.com/cisagov/pen-testing-findings

While the memory safety and security features of the Rust programming language can be effective in many situations, Rust's compiler is very particular on what constitutes good software design practices. Whenever design assumptions disagree with real-world data and assumptions, there is the possibility of security vulnerabilities–and malicious software that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), David Svoboda and Garret Wassermann, researchers with the SEI's CERT Division, explore tools for understanding vulnerabilities in Rust whether the original source code is available or not. These tools are important for understanding malicious software where source code is often unavailable, as well as commenting on possible directions in which tools and automated code analysis can improve.

Societal-scale software systems, such as today's commercial social media platforms, are among the most widely used software systems in the world, with some platforms reporting billions of daily active users. These systems have created new mechanisms for global communication and connect people with unprecedented speed. Despite the numerous benefits of societal-scale systems, these systems are designed to optimize user engagement and scale by using psychology (such as gaming and reward mechanisms) to influence users. Individual users struggle with privacy of their data and bias in these systems, while governments face new threats of misinformation. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, John Robert and Forrest Shull discuss issues that must be considered when engineering societal-scale systems.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Gregory J. Touhill, director of the SEI CERT Division, talks with Suzanne Miller about secure by design, secure by default, a longstanding tenet of the work of the SEI and CERT in particular. The SEI has been in the forefront of secure software development, promoting an approach where security weaknesses are addressed, prevented, or eliminated earlier in the software development lifecycle, which not only helps to ensure secure systems, but also saves time and money. Touhill also discusses the CERT strategy in support of SEI sponsors in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and his vision for the future of cybersecurity and the role of the CERT Division.

Secure by design means performing more security and assurance activities earlier in the product and system lifecycles. A secure-by-design mindset addresses the security of systems during the requirements, design, and development phases of lifecycles rather than waiting until the system is ready for implementation. The need for a secure-by-design mindset is exacerbated by the amount of interconnectedness of today's systems and the increasing amount of automation that characterizes system development. These trends have led to increased levels of risk and made implementation of security controls during test and patching systems after deployment increasingly unsustainable. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Robert Schiela, technical manager of the Secure Coding group, and Carol Woody, a principal researcher in the SEI's CERT Division, talk with Suzanne Miller about the importance of integrating the practices and mindset of secure by design into the acquisition and development of software-reliant systems.

Like all technical debt, enterprise technical debt consists of choices expedient in the short term, but often problematic over the long term. In enterprise technical debt, the impact reaches beyond the scope of a single system or project. Because ignoring enterprise technical debt can have significant consequences, software and systems architects should be alert for it, and they should not let it get overlooked or ignored when they come across it. Enterprise technical debt often results in multi-project or organization-wide risks that increase the organization's cost, efficiency, or security risks. Remediation of enterprise technical debt requires intervention by governance structures whose scope is broader than that of individual teams or projects. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Stephany Bellomo, a principal engineer in the SEI's Software Solutions Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about identifying and remediating enterprise technical debt.