A Light-Weight Tool for the Self-assessment of Security Compliance in Software Development – An Industry Case

Abstract

Companies are often challenged to modify and improve their software development processes in order to make them compliant with security standards. The complexity of these processes renders it difficult for practitioners to validate and foresee the effort required for compliance assessments. Further, performing gap analyses when processes are not yet mature enough is costly and involving auditors in early stages is, in our experience, often inefficient. An easier and more productive approach is conducting a self-assessment. However, practitioners, in particular developers, quality engineers, and product owners face difficulties to identify security-relevant process artifacts as required by standards. They would benefit from a proper and light-weight tool to perform early compliance assessments of their processes w.r.t. security standards before entering an in-depth audit. In this paper, we report on our current effort at Siemens Corporate Technology to develop such a light-weight assessment tool to assess the security compliance of software development processes with the IEC 62443-4-1 standard, and we discuss first results from an interview-based evaluation.