Each January on the SEI Weblog, we current the ten most-visited posts of the earlier 12 months. This 12 months’s high 10 checklist highlights the SEI’s work in software program acquisition, synthetic intelligence, giant language fashions, safe coding, insider threat mitigation, and enterprise threat administration. The posts, which had been printed between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, are introduced beneath in reverse order based mostly on the variety of visits.
by Ipek Ozkaya and Brigid O’Hearn
The fiscal 12 months 2022 Nationwide Protection Authorization Act (NDAA) Part 835, “Impartial Research on Technical Debt in Software program-Intensive Programs,” required the Secretary of Protection to have interaction a federally funded analysis and improvement heart (FFRDC) “to check technical debt in software-intensive programs.” To fulfill this requirement and lead this work, the Division of Protection (DoD) chosen the Carnegie Mellon College (CMU) Software program Engineering Institute (SEI), which is a acknowledged chief within the follow of managing technical debt. In response to NDAA Part 835, the aim of the examine was to offer, amongst different issues, analyses and suggestions on quantitative measures for assessing technical debt, present and greatest practices for measuring and managing technical debt and its related prices, and practices for lowering technical debt.
Our group spent greater than a 12 months conducting the unbiased examine. The report we produced describes the conduct of the examine, summarizes the technical traits noticed, and presents the ensuing suggestions. On this SEI Weblog publish, we summarize a number of suggestions that apply to the DoD and different improvement organizations looking for to investigate, handle, and scale back technical debt. You will discover an entire dialogue of the examine methodology, findings, and suggestions within the SEI’s Report back to the Congressional Protection Committees on Nationwide Protection Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal 12 months 2022 Part 835 Impartial Research on Technical Debt in Software program-Intensive Programs.
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by Douglas Schmidt and John E. Robert
There’s appreciable curiosity in utilizing generative AI instruments, resembling giant language fashions (LLMs), to revolutionize industries and create new alternatives within the business and authorities domains. For a lot of Division of Protection (DoD) software program acquisition professionals, the promise of LLMs is interesting, however there’s additionally a deep-seated concern that LLMs don’t deal with right now’s challenges as a result of privateness considerations, potential for inaccuracy within the output, and insecurity or uncertainty about find out how to use LLMs successfully and responsibly. This weblog publish is the second in a collection devoted to exploring how generative AI, notably LLMs resembling ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, may be utilized throughout the DoD to boost software program acquisition actions.
Our first weblog publish on this collection introduced 10 Advantages and 10 Challenges of Making use of LLMs to DoD Software program Acquisition and urged particular use circumstances the place generative AI can present worth to software program acquisition actions. This second weblog publish expands on that dialogue by displaying particular examples of utilizing LLMs for software program acquisition within the context of a doc summarization experiment, in addition to codifying the teachings we discovered from this experiment and our associated work on making use of generative AI to software program engineering.
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by Robin Ruefle
Incident response is a crucial want all through authorities and trade as cyber risk actors look to compromise crucial property inside organizations with cascading, usually catastrophic, results. In 2021, for instance, a hacker allegedly accessed a Florida water remedy plant’s pc programs and poisoned the water provide. Throughout the U.S. crucial nationwide infrastructure, 77 % of organizations have seen an increase in insider-driven cyber threats over the past three years. The 2023 IBM Value of a Knowledge Breach report highlights the essential function of getting a well-tested incident response plan. Firms with no examined plan in place will face 82 % increased prices within the occasion of a cyber assault, in contrast to those who have applied and examined such a plan.
Researchers within the SEI CERT Division compiled 10 classes discovered from our greater than 35 years of creating and dealing with incident response and safety groups all through the globe. These classes are related to incident response groups contending with an ever-evolving cyber risk panorama. In honor of the CERT Division (additionally referred to the CERT Coordination Heart in our work with the Discussion board of Incident Response and Safety Groups) celebrating 35 years of operation, on this weblog publish we have a look again at among the classes discovered from our Cyber Safety Incident Response Workforce (CSIRT) capability constructing experiences that additionally apply to different areas of safety operations.
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by Roger Black
In response to a 2023 Ponemon examine, the variety of reported insider threat incidents and the prices related to them continues to rise. With greater than 7,000 reported circumstances in 2023, the typical insider threat incident price organizations over $600,000. To assist organizations assess their insider threat applications and determine potential vulnerabilities that would end in insider threats, the SEI CERT Division has launched two instruments out there for obtain on its web site. Beforehand out there solely to licensed companions, the Insider Menace Vulnerability Evaluation (ITVA) and Insider Menace Program Analysis (ITPE) toolkits present sensible strategies to evaluate your group’s capacity to handle insider threat. This publish describes the aim and use of the toolkits, with a deal with the workbook elements of the toolkits which are the first strategies of program evaluation.
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by David Svoboda
In current weeks a number of vulnerabilities have rocked the Rust neighborhood, inflicting many to query the protection of the borrow checker, or of Rust on the whole. On this publish, we study two such vulnerabilities: the primary is CVE-2024-3094, which includes some malicious information within the xz library, and the second is CVE-2024-24576, which includes command-injection vulnerabilities in Home windows. How did these vulnerabilities come up, how had been they found, and the way do they contain Rust? Extra importantly, would possibly Rust be prone to extra comparable vulnerabilities sooner or later?
Final 12 months we printed two weblog posts in regards to the safety supplied by the Rust programming language. We mentioned the reminiscence security and concurrency security supplied by Rust’s borrow checker. We additionally described among the limitations of Rust’s safety mannequin, resembling its restricted capacity to stop varied injection assaults, and the unsafe key phrase, which permits builders to bypass Rust’s safety mannequin when obligatory. Again then, our conclusion was that no language may very well be absolutely safe, but the borrow checker did present vital, albeit restricted, reminiscence and concurrency security when not bypassed with the unsafe key phrase. We additionally examined Rust by way of the lens of supply and binary evaluation, gauged its stability and maturity, and realized that the constraints and expectations for language maturity have slowly advanced over the many years. Rust is transferring within the path of maturity right now, which is distinct from what was thought-about a mature programming language in 1980. Moreover, Rust has made some notable stability ensures, resembling promising to deprecate somewhat than delete any crates in crates.io to keep away from repeating the Leftpad fiasco.
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by Ipek Ozkaya, Douglas Schmidt, and Michael Hilton
The preliminary surge of pleasure and concern surrounding generative synthetic intelligence (AI) is progressively evolving right into a extra sensible perspective. Whereas the jury remains to be out on the precise return on funding and tangible enhancements from generative AI, the speedy tempo of change is difficult software program engineering schooling and curricula. Educators have needed to adapt to the continuing developments in generative AI to offer a sensible perspective to their college students, balancing consciousness, wholesome skepticism, and curiosity.
In a current SEI webcast, researchers mentioned the influence of generative AI on software program engineering schooling. SEI and Carnegie Mellon College consultants spoke about the usage of generative AI within the curriculum and the classroom, mentioned how college and college students can most successfully use generative AI, and regarded considerations about ethics and fairness when utilizing these instruments. The panelists took questions from the viewers and drew on their expertise as educators to talk to the crucial questions generative AI raises for software program engineering schooling.
This weblog publish options an edited transcript of responses from the unique webcast. Some questions and solutions have been rearranged and revised for readability.
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by Jeff Gennari, Shing-hon Lau, and Samuel J. Perl
Giant language fashions (LLMs) have proven a outstanding capacity to ingest, synthesize, and summarize information whereas concurrently demonstrating vital limitations in finishing real-world duties. One notable area that presents each alternatives and dangers for leveraging LLMs is cybersecurity. LLMs may empower cybersecurity consultants to be extra environment friendly or efficient at stopping and stopping assaults. Nevertheless, adversaries may additionally use generative synthetic intelligence (AI) applied sciences in form. We’ve already seen proof of actors utilizing LLMs to help in cyber intrusion actions (e.g., WormGPT, FraudGPT, and so on.). Such misuse raises many vital cybersecurity-capability-related questions together with
- Can an LLM like GPT-4 write novel malware?
- Will LLMs grow to be crucial elements of large-scale cyber-attacks?
- Can we belief LLMs to offer cybersecurity consultants with dependable data?
The reply to those questions relies on the analytic strategies chosen and the outcomes they supply. Sadly, present strategies and methods for evaluating the cybersecurity capabilities of LLMs should not complete. Lately, a group of researchers within the SEI CERT Division labored with OpenAI to develop higher approaches for evaluating LLM cybersecurity capabilities. This SEI Weblog publish, excerpted from a just lately printed paper that we coauthored with OpenAI researchers Joel Parish and Girish Sastry, summarizes 14 suggestions to assist assessors precisely consider LLM cybersecurity capabilities.
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by John E. Robert and Douglas Schmidt
Division of Protection (DoD) software program acquisition has lengthy been a posh and document-heavy course of. Traditionally, many software program acquisition actions, resembling producing Requests for Data (RFIs), summarizing authorities rules, figuring out related business requirements, and drafting venture standing updates, have required appreciable human-intensive effort. Nevertheless, the appearance of generative synthetic intelligence (AI) instruments, together with giant language fashions (LLMs), gives a promising alternative to speed up and streamline sure elements of the software program acquisition course of.
Software program acquisition is considered one of many advanced mission-critical domains that will profit from making use of generative AI to enhance and/or speed up human efforts. This weblog publish is the primary in a collection devoted to exploring how generative AI, notably LLMs like ChatGPT-4, can improve software program acquisition actions. On this publish we current 10 advantages and 10 challenges of making use of LLMs to the software program acquisition course of and counsel particular use circumstances the place generative AI can present worth. Our focus is on offering well timed data to software program acquisition professionals, together with protection software program builders, program managers, programs engineers, cybersecurity analysts, and different key stakeholders, who function inside difficult constraints and prioritize safety and accuracy.
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by Mark Sherman
The common code pattern comprises 6,000 defects per million strains of code, and the SEI’s analysis has discovered that 5 % of those defects grow to be vulnerabilities. This interprets to roughly 3 vulnerabilities per 10,000 strains of code. Can ChatGPT assist enhance this ratio? There was a lot hypothesis about how instruments constructed on high of huge language fashions (LLMs) would possibly influence software program improvement, extra particularly, how they’ll change the best way builders write code and consider it.
In March 2023 a group of CERT Safe Coding researchers—the group included Robert Schiela, David Svoboda, and myself—used ChatGPT 3.5 to look at the noncompliant software program code examples in our CERT Safe Coding customary, particularly the SEI CERT C Coding Commonplace. On this publish, I current our experiment and findings, which present that whereas ChatGPT 3.5 has promise, there are clear limitations.
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by Greg Touhill
The function of the chief data safety officer (CISO) has by no means been extra vital to organizational success. The current and near-future for CISOs will probably be marked by breathtaking technical advances, notably these related to the inclusion of synthetic intelligence applied sciences being built-in into enterprise capabilities, in addition to emergent authorized and regulatory challenges. Continued advances in generative synthetic intelligence (AI) will speed up the proliferation of deepfakes designed to erode public belief in on-line data and public establishments. Moreover, these challenges will probably be amplified by an unstable world theater by which nefarious actors and nation states chase alternatives to use any potential organizational weak point. Some forecasts have already characterised 2024 as a stress cooker atmosphere for CISOs. In such an atmosphere, abilities are crucial. On this publish I define the highest 10 abilities that CISOs want for 2024 and past. These suggestions draw upon my expertise because the director of the SEI’s CERT Division, in addition to my service as the primary federal chief data safety officer of america, main cyber operations on the U.S. Division of Homeland Safety, and my prolonged army service as a communications and our on-line world operations officer.
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Trying Forward in 2025
We publish a brand new publish on the SEI Weblog weekly. Within the coming months, search for posts highlighting the SEI’s work in synthetic intelligence, machine studying, cybersecurity, software program engineering, and extra.
