Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Webcast Series

All technology acquired by an organization requires the support of (or integration with) components, tools, and services delivered by a diverse set of supply chains. However, the practices critical to addressing supply chain risks are typically scattered across many parts of the acquiring organization, and they are performed in isolated stovepipes. This situation causes inconsistencies, gaps, and...

Understanding and articulating cybersecurity risk is hard. With the adoption of DevSecOps tools and techniques and the increased coupling between the product being built and the tools used to build them, the attack surface of the product continues to grow by incorporating segments of the development environment. Thus, many enterprises are concerned that DevSecOps pipeline weaknesses can be abused...

As a Software Engineering community, we started to hear new words with new definitions to achieve some challenges with deciding the shelf life of said terms. Some examples include: DevOps is dead, long live NoOps, SecOps, NoCode, SRE, GitOps, and recently Platform Engineering. We often confuse these terms in order to achieve certain software engineering job types. Then the organization decides to...

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is a concept that enables organizations to automate the provisioning and configuration of their IT infrastructure. This concept also aids organizations in applying the DevOps process (plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, repeat) to their infrastructure. Ansible is a popular choice within the IaC tool landscape for realizing this goal.

The lack of qualified cybersecurity professionals in the United States is a threat to our national security. We cannot adequately protect the systems that our government, economy, and critical infrastructure sectors rely on without an appropriately sized cyber workforce. By some estimates, there are over 700,000 cybersecurity job openings across the United States, with 39,000 of those in the publi...

Ransomware poses an imminent threat to most organizations. Whereas most traditional cyber attacks require extended threat actor engagement to seeking out critical information, exporting data, and demanding ransom from victims, ransomware shortens the process and puts immediate pressure on the victim to respond with payment. Unfortunately, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and other novel at...

By all recent measures, the cybersecurity workforce is woefully understaffed. According to (ISC)², the cyber workforce gap in the United States was 377,000 open positions in 2021. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has been working with the U.S. government to development novel approaches designed to shrink this gap. This talk will focus on open source init...

In this webcast,  Carol Smith, Carrie Gardner, and Michael Mattarock discuss maturing artificial intelligence (AI) practices based on our current body of knowledge. Much as it did for software engineering in the 1980s, the SEI has begun formalizing the field of AI engineering, beginning with identifying three fundamental pillars to guide AI engineering: human-centered, scalable, and robust and sec...

In this webcast, Shannon Gallagher and Dominic Ross discuss what deepfakes are, and how they are building AI/ML tech to distinguish real from fake. They will start with some well-known examples of deepfakes and discuss what makes them distinguishable as fake for people and computers.

Agile and DevSecOps have revolutionized software engineering practices. The strategies put forward in Agile and DevSecOps have eased many software engineering challenges and paved the way for continuous deployment pipelines. But what do you do when you're facing a problem that doesn't fit the model of a pure software engineering project? In this webcast, we will share our experiences applying Agil...

Complex, cyber-physical DoD systems, such as aircraft, depend on correct timing to properly and reliably execute crucial sensing, computing, and actuation functions. In this webcast, SEI staff members Bjorn Andersson, PhD, Dionisio de Niz, PhD, and William Vance of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center discuss using real-time software on multicore processo...

The Forrester report, "The Definition of Modern Zero Trust," defines Zero Trust as an information security model that denies access to applications and data by default. Zero Trust adoption can be difficult for organizations to undertake. It is not a specific technology to adopt; instead, it's an initiative that an enterprise must understand, interpret, and implement. In this webcast, SEI CERT Divi...

The status quo for how we acquire cyber-physical weapon systems (CPS) needs to be changed. It is almost certain (for any acquisition of a CPS) that there will be cost overruns, schedule delays, and/or the loss of promised warfighter capability. Improved product development technologies could be applied, but they have not been adopted widely. We will discuss the status quo, alternative approaches,...

In this episode, Grace Lewis and Shane McGraw discuss how the SEI is applying research, through its highly successful Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems (TAS) initiative, to develop foundational principles, innovative solutions, and best practices for architecting, developing, and deploying tactical and AI-enabled systems. These systems will provide solutions for teams operating in remote, tactical e...

In this webcast, Carol Woody presents the scope of a cybersecurity engineering strategy for DevSecOps along with the criticality of sharing information with direct and indirect stakeholders.

In this webcast, Brett Tucker, Ryan Zanin, and Abid Adam discuss the critical factors for risk executives to be successful to not only protect critical assets but also to take advantage of new opportunities created via the pandemic.

Zero Trust Architecture adoption is a challenge for many organizations. It isn't a specific technology to adopt; instead, it's a security initiative that an enterprise must understand, interpret, and implement. Enterprise security initiatives are never simple, and their goal to improve the enterprise's cybersecurity posture requires the alignment of multiple stakeholders, systems, acquisitions, an...

In its 2021 report, the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) wrote, "The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the world will extend far beyond narrow national security applications." How do we move beyond those narrow AI applications to gain strategic advantage? Join Dr. Matt Gaston, Director of the SEI AI Division, Dr. Steve Chien, NSCAI Commissioner and Technical Group Supervisor of t...

Self-driving cars are being tested in our cities, bespoke movie and product recommendations populate our apps, and we can count on our phones to route us around highway traffic... Why, then, do most AI deployments fail? What is needed to create, deploy, and maintain AI systems we can trust to meet our mission needs, particularly for defense and national security? The SEI recently launched an AI Di...

Misuse of authorized access to an organization's critical assets is a significant concern for organizations of all sizes, missions, and industries. We at the CERT National Insider Threat Center have been collecting and analyzing data on incidents involving malicious and unintentional insider since 2001, and have worked with numerous organizations across government, industry, and academia to develo...

The software development lifecycle has changed a lot and continues to evolve. Almost every company now is a software company.  Meeting business needs and adapting to the speed of the market for new features requires an agility mindset and continuous-delivery techniques throughout application-development lifecycles.  You have software development and deployment questions, such as: Where do I start?...

In a DevSecOps world the software supply chain extends beyond libraries upon which developed software depends. In this webinar we will look at the Solarwinds incident as a worst-case exemplifying the breadth of the software supply chain issues confronting complex DevSecOps programs. We will explore the important architectural aspects of DevSecOps that are impacted by the software supply chain that...

How do you teach cybersecurity to a middle school student? To a soldier? To some of the best hackers in the country? How do you evaluate all of these audiences' skills? Cybersecurity training has been an ongoing challenge for decades. The key to making the best use of your training dollar is to craft training that matches your audience's needs and engages them in a meaningful manner. When you crea...

Managing third-party relationships, such as pubic cloud service providers, requires a set of skills often unfamiliar to many technologists. These relationships are constructed on a foundation of verifiable trust. This requires managing the cybersecurity performance of third parties via contractual mechanisms rather than the traditional line-of-sight practices used internal to an organization. Chie...

IEEE 2675 standard specifies technical principles and practices to build, package, and deploy systems and applications in a reliable and secure way. The standard focuses on establishing effective compliance and IT controls. It presents principles of DevOps including mission first, customer focus, shift-left, continuous everything, and systems thinking. It also describes how stakeholders, including...