Trustworthiness Assessment of Web Applications: Approach and Experimental Study using Input Validation Coding Practices The popularity of web applications and their worldwide use to support business critical operations raised the interest of hackers on exploiting security vulnerabilities to perform malicious operations. Fostering trust calls for assessment techniques that provide indicators about the quality of a web application from a security perspective. This paper studies the problem of using coding practices to characterize the trustworthiness of web applications from a security perspective. The hypothesis is that applying feasible security practices results in applications having a reduced number of unknown vulnerabilities, and can therefore be considered more trustworthy. The proposed approach is instantiated for the concrete case of input validation practices, and includes a Quality Model to compute trustworthiness scores that can be used to compare different applications or different code elements in the same application. Experimental results show that the higher scores are obtained for more secure code, suggesting that it can be used in practice to characterize trustworthiness, also providing guidance to compare andor improve the security of web applications.

Measuring the accuracy of software vulnerability assessments: experiments with students and professionals Assessing the risks of software vulnerabilities is a key process of software development and security management. This assessment requires to consider multiple factors (technical features, operational environment, involved assets, status of the vulnerability lifecycle, etc.) and may depend from the assessorxe2x80x99s knowledge and skills. In this work, we tackle with an important part of this problem by measuring the accuracy of technical vulnerability assessments by assessors with different level and type of knowledge. We report an experiment to compare how accurately students with different technical education and security professionals are able to assess the severity of software vulnerabilities with the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (v3) industry methodology. Our results could be useful for increasing awareness about the intrinsic subtleties of vulnerability risk assessment and possibly better compliance with regulations. With respect to academic education, professional training and human resources selections our work suggests that measuring the effects of knowledge and expertise on the accuracy of software security assessments is feasible albeit not easy.