Application Portfolio Risk Ranking: Banishing FUD With Structure and Numbers

The presentation
Far too often application security decisions are made in an ad hoc manner and based on little or no data. This leads to an inefficient allocation of scarce resources. To move beyond fear, uncertainty and doubt, organizations must adopt an approach to application risk management based on a structured process and quantitative data. This talk outlines such an approach for organizations to enumerate all the applications in their portfolio. It then goes through background information to collect for each application to support further decision-making. In addition, the talk presents an application risk-ranking framework allowing security analysts to quantitatively categorize their application assets and then plan for assessment activities based on available budgets. Attendees will leave with the knowledge and tools required for them to use the approach on the applications they are responsible for in their organization. Template spreadsheets and a How-To guide will also be provided.

The speaker
Dan Cornell has over twelve years of experience architecting and developing web-based software systems. He leads Denim Group’s security research team in investigating the application of secure coding and development techniques to improve web-based software development methodologies.

Dan was the founding coordinator and chairman for the Java Users Group of San Antonio (JUGSA) and currently serves as the OWASP San Antonio chapter leader, member of the OWASP Global Membership Committee and co-lead of the OWASP Open Review Project. Dan has spoken at such international conferences as ROOTs in Norway and OWASP EU Summit in Portugal.