Addressing software security and mitigations in the life cycle

Traditionally, security is viewed as an organizational and information technology (IT) systems function comprising of firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), system security settings and patches to the operating system (OS) and applications running on it. Until recently, little thought has been given to the importance of security as a formal approach in the software life cycle. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has approached the problem through the development of an integrated formal software security assessment instrument (SSAI) with six foci for the software life cycle.