WGU C706 SECURE SOFTWARE DESIGN STUDY

GUIDE

CIA Triad:

Confidentiality: In information security, confidentiality "is the property, that information is not made available or

disclosed to unauthorized individuals, entities, or processes"

Integrity: In information security, data integrity means maintaining and assuring the accuracy and completeness of

data over its entire life-cycle. This means that data cannot be modified in an unauthorized or undetected manner. This

can be also used to validate databases to make sure none of the data is corrupt or modified in an unauthorized matter.

Availability: For any information system to serve its purpose, the information must be available when it is needed.

This means that the computing systems used to store and process the information, the security controls used to protect

it, and the communication channels used to access it must be functioning correctly.

Secure Software Design Feature:

Confidentiality: Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Cryptography/Encryption

Availability: Offsite back-up and Redundancy

Integrity: Hashing, Message Digest (MD5), non repudiation and digital signatures

Software Architect: The software architect moves analysis to implementation and analyzes the requirements and use

cases as activities to perform as part of the development process. That person can also develop class diagrams.

Security Practitioner Roles:

Release Manager: Deployment

Architect: Design

Developer: Coding

Business Analyst/Project Manager: Requirements Gathering

Red Team: These are teams of people familiar with the infrastructure of the company and the languages of the

software being developed. Their mission is to kill the system as the developers build it.

Static Analysis: Static analysis, also called static code analysis, is a method of computer program debugging that is done

by examining the code without executing the program. The process provides an understanding of the code structure, and

can help to ensure that the code adheres to industry standards. It's also referred as code review.

MD5 Hash: The MD5 algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. Although MD5 was

initially designed to be used as a cryptographic hash function, it has been found to suffer from extensive vulnerabilities. It

can still be used as a checksum to verify data integrity, but only against unintentional corruption. (Integrity)

SHA-256: The SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) is one of a number of cryptographic hash functions. A cryptographic hash

is like a signature for a text or a data file. SHA-256 algorithm generates an almost-unique, fixed size 256-bit (32-byte)

hash. Hash is a one-way function – it cannot be decrypted back. (Integrity)

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WGU C706 SECURE SOFTWARE DESIGN STUDY

GUIDE

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES): AES (acronym of Advanced Encryption Standard) is a symmetric encryption

algorithm. The algorithm was developed by two Belgian cryptographer Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. AES was

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WGU C706 SECURE SOFTWARE DESIGN STUDY

GUIDE

designed to be efficient in both hardware and software, and supports a block length of 128 bits and key lengths of 128,

192, and 256 bits. (Confidentiality)

Stochastic: The analogy between safety and security is particularly close. The main difference is that safety-relevant

faults are stochastic (i.e., unintentional or accidental), whereas security-relevant faults are “sponsored,” i.e., intentionally

created and activated through conscious and intentional human agency.

Fuzz Testing: Is used to see if the system has solid exception handling to the input it receives. Is the use of malformed or

random input into a system in order to intentionally produce failure. This is a very easy process of feeding garbage to the

system when it expects a formatted input, and it is always a good idea to feed as much garbage as possible to an input

field.

Three (3) Tier: The 3 tier architecture model removes the business logic from the client end of the system. It generally

places the business logic on a separate server from the client. The data access portion of the system resides on a 3rd

tier, which is separate from both the client and the business logic platform.

T-MAP: USC’s Threat Modeling based on Attacking Path analysis (T-MAP) is a risk management approach that

quantifies total severity weights of relevant attacking paths for COTS-based systems. T-MAP’s strengths lie in its ability

to maintain sensitivity to an organization’s business value priorities and Information Technology (IT) environment, to

prioritize and estimate security investment effectiveness and evaluate performance, and to communicate executivefriendly vulnerability details as threat profiles to help evaluate cost efficiency.

Trike: Trike is an open source conceptual framework, methodology, and toolset designed to autogenerate repeatable

threat models. Its methodology enables the risk analyst to accurately and completely describe the security characteristics

of the system, from high-level architecture to low-level implementation of details. It also requires building a defensive

model of the subject system.

SDL Threat Modeling Tool: This free tool assists in the creation of threat models. It builds on Microsoft Visio

and provides a tool for constructing graphic representation of threat models for the system without requiring

expertise in security and also has the capability of graphically representing a software system and identifying

vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Mapping:

The overall goal of performing vulnerability mapping is to determine the most likely locations within the system

in development where an attacker will strike. This is done on the design phase of the SDLC

V3: This is the highest level of vulnerability. This is a very likely target for an attacker, such as free text input in a form.

These are the highest priory for a security plan for the system and these should all be mitigated and accounted for by

established control systems in development.

V2: This is the moderate level vulnerability. These are possible but not probable targets. These will include interprocess

communications on the server or traffic within the trust boundary of the system. Eavesdropping is the most significant risk

in this situation. V2 level vulnerabilities should always be mitigated in the system, but in a trade off analysis, strict control

may not be necessary as long as a procedure is in place to fail safely and protect any private or confidential data.

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