Hands on OWASP Vulnerabilities and Knowledge Cafe on Secure Software Development

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Press Release

Chennai, March 14, 2009: Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar college of Engineering’s Department of Information Technology and its Forum for Information Networking and Security (FINS) organized a one day “Hands on OWASP Vulnerabilities and Knowledge Café on Secure Software Development” on March 14, 2009, as a next level event following its two-day workshop on Information Security Essentials and Application Security on January 9^th and 10^th, 2009.

In line with SSN’s mission to be a centre of excellence in education in emerging technologies -in tandem with industry and industry trends, The Department of Information Technology’s FINS with its motto: For Inspiring and Navigating Security Research, has been organizing this series of workshops with an objective to provide foundations and the much needed awareness and education on software security.

Having laid the necessary foundations in Information Security with specializations in Application Security, by the Jan 9-10, 2009 workshop, this event was designed and conducted as a practical cum collaborative learning process. The participants worked on practical lab based lessons, becoming aware of the top Application Security Vulnerabilities using the tools of OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project). They were then given an introductory presentation on Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle. After these foundations in software security they participated in the Knowledge Café on Secure Software Development. The participants enthusiastically involved themselves in this Knowledge Café, a first of its kind in the academic environment, which resulted in generating a number of ideas for securer software development. The deliberations concluded with the need for looking at holistic systemic solutions, with the first step as the much needed education and awareness in this domain, as both the cost effective and long term solution for the problems of insecure software and its effects.

The practices were guided and facilitated by the faculty of the FINS forum at SSN. The knowledge Café was conducted by associates from Cognizant, who have themselves organized and tasted the success of Knowledge Café as a lively way of knowledge sharing and creation at Cognizant.

These workshops were initiated in response to wide spread attacks on the application software which constitutes more than 70% of the total web attacks as pointed out by the market research surveys. The workshop has sponsorship from Cognizant, in addition to the internal funding from SSN.