The Art of Software Security Testing

Risk-based security testing, the important subject of this book, is one of seven software security touchpoints introduced in my book, Software Security: Building Security In . This book takes the basic idea several steps forward. Written by masters of software exploit, this book describes in very basic terms how security testing differs from standard software testing as practiced by QA groups everywhere. It unifies in one place ideas from Michael Howard, David Litchfield, Greg Hoglund, and me into a concise introductory package. Improve your security testing by reading this book today."

- Gary McGraw , Ph.D., CTO, Cigital; Author, Software Security, Exploiting Software, Building Secure Software, and Software Fault Injection ; www.cigital.com/~gem

"As 2006 closes out, we will see over 5,000 software vulnerabilities announced to the public. Many of these vulnerabilities were, or will be, found in enterprise applications from companies who are staffed with large, professional, QA teams. How then can it be that these flaws consistently continue to escape even well-structured diligent testing? The answer, in part, is that testing still by and large only scratches the surface when validating the presence of security flaws. Books such as this hopefully will start to bring a more thorough level of understanding to the arena of security testing and make us all a little safer over time."

- Alfred Huger , Senior Director, Development, Symantec Corporation

"Software security testing may indeed be an art, but this book provides the paint-by-numbers to perform good, solid, and appropriately destructive security testing: proof that an ounce of creative destruction is worth a pound of patching later. If understanding how software can be broken is step one in every programmers' twelve-step program to defensible, secure, robust software, then knowledgeable security testing comprises at least steps two through six."

- Mary Ann Davidson , Chief Security Officer,