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Software is a complex thing. It is not an engineering artifact that springs forth from a design by simply following software coding rules; creativity and the human element are at the heart of the process. Software development is part science, part art, and part craft. Design, architecture, and coding are equally important activities and in each of these activities, errors may be introduced that lead to security vulnerabilities. Therefore, inevitably, errors enter into the code. Some of these errors are discovered during testing; however, some are not. The best way to find security errors,
whether they are introduced as part of the architecture development effort or coding effort, is to automate the security testing process to the maximum extent possible and add this class of tools to the tools available, which aids in the compilation process, testing, test analysis, and software distribution. Recent technological advances, improvements in computer-generated forces (CGFs), and results in research in information assurance and software protection indicate that we can build a semi-intelligent software security testing tool. However, before we can undertake the security
testing automation effort, we must understand the scope of the required testing, the security failures that need to be uncovered during testing, and the characteristics of the failures. Therefore, we undertook the research reported in the paper, which is the development of a taxonomy and a discussion of software attacks generated from the point of view of the security tester with the goal of using the taxonomy to guide the development of the knowledge base for the automated security testing tool. The representation for attacks and threat cases yielded by this research captures the
strategies, tactics, and other considerations that come into play during the planning and execution of attacks upon application software. The paper is organized as follows. Section one contains an introduction to our research and a discussion of the motivation for our work. Section two contains a presents our taxonomy of software attacks and a discussion of the strategies employed and general weaknesses exploited for each attack. Section three contains a summary and suggestions for further research.
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