

We often end the process with a eureka moment, and a statement like “well of course that was broken because of …”, and implement the fix with some chagrin. Along the way, we may need to challenge some deeply held assumptions about how our systems work (have you ever found yourself questioning basic arithmetic?). This approach is most obvious to us when we are debugging unexpected behavior-we must become increasingly precise about our expectations and how the reality of the system differs. We may not often think about our work in this way, but I believe this is an essential aspect of building dependable code. We articulate assumptions, adopt hypotheses, and formulate experiments to test those hypotheses - in other words, the scientific method.
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Code is very abstract and difficult to visualize, so we must develop analytic coping strategies to identify and test edge cases.
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Some skills and associated knowledge in software engineering transcend the boundaries of our sub-disciplines. How can I hold the opinion that specialization is natural and expected, while simultaneously believing that all engineers should have at least some knowledge of security matters? Why is security special? These people do exist to some extent, though they are rare, expensive, and cannot possibly know everything - the space is simply too big now for one person to have a pervasive, deep knowledge.

Some hiring committees still resist this, adamant in their search for “full stack” engineers who can be dropped into any project and be immediately effective - the commandos of software. We often pick our specialty at some point early in our careers, dedicate ourselves to becoming experts in that area, and declare everything else a problem for some other poor soul. For this reason, backend engineers are often resistant to learning about frontend matters, users of static languages won’t even consider the merits of dynamic languages, and so on. There are enough things to learn within our chosen sub-disciplines for a lifetime, such that even the idea of diving into the complexity of other disciplines can be exhausting. This specialization of software engineers should not be surprising, given the growing complexity and scope of the problems we solve. They are not wrong, but I believe we have to meet in the middle. Other engineers retort that it is the responsibility of security engineers to package up our best practices into tools and libraries that prevent bad behavior or catch mistakes, while providing actionable output that explains the issue and resolution.

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Security engineers often lament the inability to get their fellow software engineers to take security matters in their code seriously, or even show any interest in learning about the most common mistakes and how to avoid them. Here, I will argue that the same transition is coming for security matters, and that this is a good thing for your code and your career. This was not always the case, but the industry shifted in the 2000s to expect this core competency. Security engineers are similarly inclined, though they may focus on more specific angles of attack.Īs a software engineer, knowing how to test the code you maintain is now a standard and expected part of your job - many companies even rigorously test this skill during their technical interview process. They find edge cases, unexpected interactions between components, and search for undefined or underspecified behavior in systems. QA engineers are adept at identifying and testing assumptions in software. Security engineers might do similarly absurd things: shout orders through a megaphone so no other orders can be heard, try to convince the bar staff that they own the bar and therefore don’t need to pay for drinks, or impersonate other patrons to place orders on their tabs. There is an old joke: A QA engineer walks into a bar.
