Software Assurance Landscape

The security and integrity of information systems has become a critical issue within most types of organizations, and finding better ways to address the topic has become the objective of many in industry, academia, and government. The development, sharing, and leveraging of software assurance knowledge is becoming a key enabler to making the types of changes and improvements that are needed to address these issues.

The Software Security Assurance: A State-of-the-Art Report (SOAR) (pdf) represents an output of collaborative efforts of organizations and individuals in the SwA Forum and working groups. The SOAR provides an overview of the current state of the environment in which software must operate and surveys current and emerging activities and organizations involved in promoting various aspects of software security assurance. The report also describes the variety of techniques and technologies in use in government, industry, and academia for specifying, acquiring, producing, assessing, and deploying software that can, with a justifiable degree of confidence, be said to be secure. The report also presents observations about noteworthy trends in software security assurance as a discipline. Many other SwA resources are provided by the SwA working groups.

There are a large number of software assurance knowledge development and sharing activities and initiatives being pursued by a variety of groups, including public standards groups, industry associations, commercial organizations, academia, and government.

This collaborative portal will attempt to

draw a somewhat broad picture of the organizations and efforts of the software assurance landscape
identify and describe various knowledge resources being developed and made available by these efforts
describe and explore how many of these efforts and knowledge resources are actually mutually supportive, well aligned, and complementary
identify gaps and opportunities in the current landscape
support collaborative discourse among the members of the software assurance community

Together these efforts and knowledge resources compose major segments of a comprehensive approach to economically addressing the software development, systems operation, accreditation/reporting, research and development, and education needs of today's corporations, governments, and everyone else. The information technology security capabilities of our critical infrastructure and commerce capabilities are totally dependent on software, networks, and information, and thus bringing improvements and manageability to these will benefit all.

There are hundreds of efforts, initiatives, and standards being developed, propagated, or discussed in the information security arena, yet most people are probably aware of only a few.

As a community resource, the Software Assurance Consortium (SwAC) provides the portal for the Software Assurance Landscape.

The portal is organized to cover a number of topics related to software assurance. The following is brief snapshot of the categories of information included:

Overview and Scoping of Software Assurance
Software Assurance State of the Art/Practice Summary
Software Assurance Knowledge, Activities and Initiatives

Software Assurance Landscape Topical Index
Software Assurance Landscape Alphabetical Index

Software Assurance Domain Summaries
Software Assurance Community Objectives
Software Assurance Knowledge Architecture
Software Assurance Collaboration Communities
Software Assurance Aggregate Bibliography
Software Assurance Community Calendar

The SwAC has loaded the Software Landscape document onto the website. Its availability is limited to registered users. Access is via user name and password. If you are a registered user, enter your information. If you have not registered, you will be asked to complete the application form and you will receive your registration information via email after approval.