Biblio

Software Engineering is a field of new challenges every day. With every passing day, new technologies emerge. There was an era of web Applications, but the time has changed and most of the web Applications are available as Mobile Applications as well. The Mobile Applications are either android based or iOS based. To deliver error free, secure and reliable Application, it is necessary to test the Applications properly. Software testing is a phase of software development life cycle, where we test an Application in all aspects. Nowadays different type of tools are available for testing an Application automatically but still we have too many challenges for applying test cases on a given Application. In this paper the authors will discuss the challenges of automation of test cases for a Mobile based payment Application.

The growth of the internet has brought along positive gains such as the emergence of a highly interconnected world. However, on the flip side, there has been a growing concern on how secure distributed systems can be built effectively and tested for security vulnerabilities prior to deployment. Developing a secure software product calls for a deep technical understanding of some complex issues with regards to the software and its operating environment, as well as embracing a systematic approach of analyzing the software. This paper proposes a method for identifying software security vulnerabilities from software requirement specifications written in Structured Object-oriented Formal Language (SOFL). Our proposed methodology leverages on the concept of providing an early focus on security by identifying potential security vulnerabilities at the requirement analysis and verification phase of the software development life cycle.

The software development life cycle (SDLC) starts with business and functional specifications signed with a client. In addition to this, the specifications also capture policy / procedure / contractual / regulatory / legislation / standard compliances with respect to a given client industry. The SDLC must adhere to service level agreements (SLAs) while being compliant to development activities, processes, tools, frameworks, and reuse of open-source software components. In today's world, global software development happens across geographically distributed (autonomous) teams consuming extraordinary amounts of open source components drawn from a variety of disparate sources. Although this is helping organizations deal with technical and economic challenges, it is also increasing unintended risks, e.g., use of a non-complaint license software might lead to copyright issues and litigations, use of a library with vulnerabilities pose security risks etc. Mitigation of such risks and remedial measures is a challenge due to lack of visibility and transparency of activities across these distributed teams as they mostly operate in silos. We believe a unified model that non-invasively monitors and analyzes the activities of distributed teams will help a long way in building software that adhere to various compliances. In this paper, we propose a decentralized CAG - Compliance Adherence and Governance framework using blockchain technologies. Our framework (i) enables the capturing of required data points based on compliance specifications, (ii) analyzes the events for non-conformant behavior through smart contracts, (iii) provides real-time alerts, and (iv) records and maintains an immutable audit trail of various activities.

Software security is an important aspect that needs to be considered during the entire software development life cycle (SDLC). Integrating software security at each phase of SDLC has become an urgent need. To address software security, various approaches, techniques, methods, practices, and models have been proposed and developed. However, recent research shows that many software development methodologies do not explicitly include methods for incorporating software security during the development of software as it evolves from requirements engineering to its final disposal. The primary objective of this research is to study the state-of-the-art of security in the context of SDLC by following systematic mapping study (SMS). In the second phase, we will identify, through systematic literature review (SLR) and empirical study in the industry, the software security contributions, security challenges and their practices for global software development (GSD) vendors. The ultimate aim is to develop a Software Security Assurance Model (SSAM) to assist GSD vendor organisations in measuring their readiness towards the development of secure software.

There is widening chasm between the ease of creating software and difficulty of "building security in". This paper reviews the approach, the findings and recent experiments from a seven-year effort to enable consistency across a large, diverse development organization and software portfolio via policies, guidance, automated tools and services. Experience shows that developing secure software is an elusive goal for most. It requires every team to know and apply a wide range of security knowledge in the context of what software is being built, how the software will be used, and the projected threats in the environment where the software will operate. The drive for better outcomes for secure development and increased developer productivity led to experiments to augment developer knowledge and eventually realize the goal of "building the right security in".

Currently, dependence on web applications is increasing rapidly for social communication, health services, financial transactions and many other purposes. Unfortunately, the presence of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in these applications allows malicious user to steals sensitive information, install malware, and performs various malicious operations. Researchers proposed various approaches and developed tools to detect XSS vulnerability from source code of web applications. However, existing approaches and tools are not free from false positive and false negative results. In this paper, we propose a taint analysis and defensive programming based HTML context-sensitive approach for precise detection of XSS vulnerability from source code of PHP web applications. It also provides automatic suggestions to improve the vulnerable source code. Preliminary experiments and results on test subjects show that proposed approach is more efficient than existing ones.

Dependence on web applications is increasing very rapidly in recent time for social communications, health problem, financial transaction and many other purposes. Unfortunately, presence of security weaknesses in web applications allows malicious user's to exploit various security vulnerabilities and become the reason of their failure. Currently, SQL Injection (SQLI) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are most dangerous security vulnerabilities exploited in various popular web applications i.e. eBay, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. Research on defensive programming, vulnerability detection and attack prevention techniques has been quite intensive in the past decade. Defensive programming is a set of coding guidelines to develop secure applications. But, mostly developers do not follow security guidelines and repeat same type of programming mistakes in their code. Attack prevention techniques protect the applications from attack during their execution in actual environment. The difficulties associated with accurate detection of SQLI and XSS vulnerabilities in coding phase of software development life cycle. This paper proposes a classification of software security approaches used to develop secure software in various phase of software development life cycle. It also presents a survey of static analysis based approaches to detect SQL Injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in source code of web applications. The aim of these approaches is to identify the weaknesses in source code before their exploitation in actual environment. This paper would help researchers to note down future direction for securing legacy web applications in early phases of software development life cycle.

Very often in the software development life cycle, security is applied too late or important security aspects are overlooked. Although the use of security patterns is gaining popularity, the current state of security requirements patterns is such that there is not much in terms of a defining structure. To address this issue, we are working towards defining the important characteristics as well as the boundaries for security requirements patterns in order to make them more effective. By examining an existing general pattern format that describes how security patterns should be structured and comparing it to existing security requirements patterns, we are deriving characterizations and boundaries for security requirements patterns. From these attributes, we propose a defining format. We hope that these can reduce user effort in elicitation and specification of security requirements patterns.