Category:OWASP Legal Project

Overview
The OWASP Legal project provides materials related to the legal aspects of secure software, including contracting, liability, and compliance. This project should not be considered legal advice, and we strongly recommend that you find competent counsel to assist with your contract negotiations. Project materials have been place in the public domain to facilitate use in private contracts.

The OWASP Legal project's Secure Software Development Contract Annex (Contract Annex) is guidance that you should take with you when you talk to a qualified attorney to negotiate and capture important contractual terms and conditions related to the security of the software to be developed or delivered. It is a starting point for your agreement. You may not like all the activities, or may want to propose more. You may want to assign responsibilities differently. It is not intended to exactly capture the needs of all software Clients and Developers. The Contract Annex is intended to provide a framework for discussing the key topics that are important to ensuring that software ends up secure. After you have a security discussion and reach agreement, you should tailor this agreement to match.

Read about our plans in the OWASP Legal Project Roadmap. More details about the Contract Annex are below.

OWASP Secure Software Contract Annex
There are many benefits to working through the OWASP Secure Software Development Contract Annex. The principal one is that it will make expectations clear between the parties involved. In some cases it will help to prevent lawsuits when difficult security problems surface in the software. Also, these are the same activities that are required by many legal and regulatory compliance reasons.

The goal of the Contract Annex is simply to ensure, at each stage of the life cycle, that appropriate attention has been paid to security. An additional benefit is that this documentation can be collected together to form a "certification package" that essentially lays out the argument for why this software should be trusted to do what it claims it does.


 * OWASP Secure Software Contract Annex
 * Secure software contracting hypothetical case study

You can download the Microsoft Word version and modify it to suit your needs. Please consider contributing back any enhancements you make.

Feedback and Participation
We hope you find the OWASP Secure Software Contract Annex useful. Please contribute back to the project by sending your comments, questions, and suggestions to owasp@owasp.org. To join the OWASP Legal mailing list or view the archives, please visit the subscription page.

Project Contributors
The Legal project lead is Jeff Williams of Aspect Security. He can be reached at jeff.williams 'at' owasp.org.

Project Sponsors
The OWASP Legal project is sponsored by https://www.owasp.org/images/d/d1/Aspect_logo.gif