A Case for Instilling Security as a Core Programming Skill

Building secure software is an extremely important, but difficult task. Insecure software can result in vulnerabilities which allow individual systems or entire networks to be compromised. Historically, software security has been an afterthought as internal red teams or other external reporting means were utilized to uncover vulnerabilities. Currently, software development processes address security issues during the planning stages and include security testing. We take another step, realizing that one key to developing secure software is in the development of software engineers who understand security. Introducing software security during an introductory level course is advantageous as it will help instill software security awareness as part of the basic coding skill set of future software engineers. We present a three step system of instilling software security as a core programming skill using the buffer overflow problem as a sample security topic