Biblio

Proactive security reviews and test efforts are a necessary component of the software development lifecycle. Resource limitations often preclude reviewing the entire code base. Making informed decisions on what code to review can improve a team's ability to find and remove vulnerabilities. Risk-based attack surface approximation (RASA) is a technique that uses crash dump stack traces to predict what code may contain exploitable vulnerabilities. The goal of this research is to help software development teams prioritize security efforts by the efficient development of a risk-based attack surface approximation. We explore the use of RASA using Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Windows stack traces from crash dumps. We create RASA at the file level for Firefox, in which the 15.8% of the files that were part of the approximation contained 73.6% of the vulnerabilities seen for the product. We also explore the effect of random sampling of crashes on the approximation, as it may be impractical for organizations to store and process every crash received. We find that 10-fold random sampling of crashes at a rate of 10% resulted in 3% less vulnerabilities identified than using the entire set of stack traces for Mozilla Firefox. Sampling crashes in Windows 8.1 at a rate of 40% resulted in insignificant differences in vulnerability and file coverage as compared to a rate of 100%.

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide a unique opportunity to reach out to students who would not normally be reached by alleviating the need to be physically present in the classroom. However, teaching software security coursework outside of a classroom setting can be challenging. What are the challenges when converting security material from an on-campus course to the MOOC format? The goal of this research is to assist educators in constructing software security coursework by providing a comparison of classroom courses and MOOCs. In this work, we compare demographic information, student motivations, and student results from an on-campus software security course and a MOOC version of the same course. We found that the two populations of students differed, with the MOOC reaching a more diverse set of students than the on-campus course. We found that students in the on-campus course had higher quiz scores, on average, than students in the MOOC. Finally, we document our experience running the courses and what we would do differently to assist future educators constructing similar MOOC's.