Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

The Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential component of the Internet, a virtual phone book of names and numbers, but we rarely think about it until something goes wrong. DNS also serves as the backbone for other services critical to organizations including email, external web access, file sharing and voice over IP (VoIP). There are steps, however, that network administrators can take to ensure t...

As a software system moves through its lifecycle, each phase calls for the architect to use a different mix of skills. This podcast explores three roles and three failure patterns of software architects that he has observed working with industry and government software projects. This blog post by John Klein is read by Bill Thomas. Listen on Apple Podcasts .

Recent research indicates that security is no longer only a matter of code and is tightly linked to software architecture. SEI researchers have created security-focused modeling tools that capture vulnerabilities and their propagation paths in an architecture. These security-focused modeling tools help security analysts and researchers improve system and software analysis. In this podcast, Julien...

In November 2016, Internet users across the Eastern Seaboard of the United States had trouble accessing popular websites, such as Reddit, Netflix, and the New York Times. Known as the Dyn attack, the disruption was the result of multiple distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against a single organization: Dyn, a New Hampshire-based Internet infrastructure company. DDoS attacks can be extrem...

Effective cybersecurity engineering requires the integration of security into the software acquisition and development lifecycle. For engineering to address security effectively, requirements that establish the target goal for security must be in place. Risk management must include identification of possible threats and vulnerabilities within the system, along with the ways to accept or address th...

Dynamic network defense (or moving target defense) is based on a simple premise: a moving target is harder to attack than a stationary target. In recent years the government has invested substantially into moving target and adaptive cyber defense. This rapidly growing field has seen recent developments of many new technologies—defenses that range from shuffling of client-to-server assignments to p...

Cyber intelligence is the acquisition of information to identify, track, or predict the cyber capabilities and actions of malicious actors to offer courses of action to decision makers charged with protecting organizations. In this podcast, Jared Ettinger of the SEI's Emerging Technology Center (ETC) talks about the ETC's latest work in cyber intelligence as well as the Cyber Intelligence Research...

In this podcast, Peter Feiler describes a textual requirement specification language for the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) called ReqSpec. ReqSpec is based on the draft Requirements Definition and Analysis Language Annex, which defines a meta-model for requirement specification as annotations to AADL models. A set of plug-ins to the Open Source AADL Tool Environment (OSATE...

Whether you are a CISO, CISO equivalent, or have another title with organizational cybersecurity responsibilities, the role you play in your organization to protect and sustain the key information and technical assets needed to achieve the mission is critical in today's landscape of data breaches, nation-state hackers, and increased threats to the business. In this podcast, Darrell Keeling, Vice P...

To ensure software will function as intended and is free of vulnerabilities (aka software assurance), software engineers must consider security early in the lifecycle, when the system is being designed and architected. Recent research on vulnerabilities supports this claim: Nearly half the weaknesses identified in the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) repository have been identified as design weak...

By the close of 2016, annual global IP traffic will pass the zettabyte ([ZB]; 1000 exabytes [EB]) threshold and will reach 2.3 ZBs per year by 2020, according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index. While capturing and evaluating network traffic enables defenders of large-scale organizational networks to generate security alerts and identify intrusions, operators of networks with even comparatively mo...

In this podcast, Girish Seshagiri discusses a two-year community college software assurance program that he developed and facilitated with SEI Fellow Nancy Mead at Illinois Community College. The two-year degree program in secure software development, which is based on the SEI's software assurance curriculum, is the result of a collaboration between Central Illinois Center of Excellence for Secure...

Internet-connected devices—from cars, insulin pumps, and baby monitors to thermostats and coffee makers—are growing in number and complexity. Most of these Internet of Things (IoT) devices weren't built with connectivity and security in mind, leaving them vulnerable to attacks. In this podcast, CERT researcher Art Manion discusses work that his team is doing with the Department of Homeland Securit...

The position of SEI Fellow is awarded to people who have made an outstanding contribution to the work of the SEI and from whom the SEI leadership may expect valuable advice for continued success in the institute's mission. Nancy Mead, a principal researcher in the SEI's CERT Division, was named an SEI Fellow in 2013. This podcast is the first in a series highlighting interviews with SEI Fellows.  ...

Safety-critical software must be analyzed and checked carefully. Each potential error, failure, or defect must be considered and evaluated before you release a new product. For example, if you are producing a quadcopter drone, you would like to know the probability of engine failure to evaluate the system's reliability. Safety analysis is hard. Standards such as ARP4761 mandate several analyses, s...

Organizations "are concerned about the risks associated with information and communications technology (ICT) products and services that may contain potentially malicious functionality, are counterfeit, or are vulnerable due to poor manufacturing and development practices within the ICT supply chain. These risks are associated with the organizations' decreased visibility into, understanding of, and...

Intelligence preparation for Operational Resilience (IPOR) is a structured framework that decision makers can use to: •identify intelligence needs •consume the information received by intelligence sources •make informed decisions about the organization and courses of action In this podcast, Douglas Gray, a member of the CERT Cyber Risk Management team, discusses how to operationalize intelligence...

In the past decade, the U.S. Air Force has built up great capability with the Distributed Common Ground System (AF DCGS), the Air Force's primary weapon system for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, planning, direction, collection, processing, exploitation, analysis, and dissemination. AF DCGS employs a global communications architecture that connects multiple intelligence platforms and s...

Threat modeling, which has been popularized by Microsoft in the last decade, provides vulnerability analysts a means to analyze a system and identify various attack surfaces and use that knowledge to bolster a system against vulnerabilities. In this podcast, Art Manion and Allen Householder of  CERT's vulnerability analysis team, talk about threat modeling and its use in improving security of the...

Due to advances in hardware and software technologies, Department of Defense (DoD) systems today are highly capable and complex. However, they also face increasing scale, computation, and security challenges. Compounding these challenges, DoD systems were historically designed using stove-piped architectures that lock the government into a small number of system integrators, each devising propriet...

The Department of Defense (DoD) must focus on sustaining legacy weapons systems that are no longer in production, but are expected to remain a key component of our defense capability for decades to come. Despite the fact that these legacy systems are no longer in the acquisition phase, software upgrade cycles are needed to refresh their capabilities every 18 to 24 months. In addition, significant...

Safety-critical systems are becoming extremely software-reliant. Software complexity can increase total acquisition costs as much as 16 percent. The Effective Reduction of Avoidable Complexity in Embedded Systems (ERACES) project aims to identify and remove complexity in software models. At the same time, safety-critical development is shifting from traditional programming (e.g., Ada, C) to modeli...

We know from existing SEI work on attribute-driven design, Quality Attribute Workshops, and the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method that a focus on quality attributes prevents costly rework. Such a long-term perspective, however, can be hard to maintain in a high-tempo, agile delivery model, which is why the SEI continues to recommend an architecture-centric engineering approach, regardless of t...

Whether Java is more secure than C is a simple question to ask, but a hard question to answer well. When researchers on the CERT Secure Coding Team began writing the SEI CERT Oracle Coding Standard for Java, they thought that Java would require fewer secure coding rules than the SEI CERT C Coding Standard because Java was designed with security in mind. They also assumed that a more secure languag...

In our studies of many large-scale software systems, we have observed that defective files seldom exist alone. They are usually architecturally connected, and their architectural structures exhibit significant design flaws that propagate bugginess among files. We call these flawed structures the architecture roots, a type of technical debt that incurs high maintenance penalties. Removing the archi...