CSSLP (Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional)

Chapter 1: Secure Software Concepts Domain

• Define core security objectives for software development.
• Describe the information security triad and explain the main mechanisms of confidentiality, integrity and availability of information.
• Characterize the relationship between information security and data privacy.
• Describe accountability, auditing and logging in the context of software security.
• Explain non-repudiation, digital signatures, benefits of code signing and blockchain.
• Understand the foundational concepts behind security design principles with respect to secure software development.

Chapter 2: Secure Software Lifecycle and Risk Management Domain

• Understand and describe OWASP’s Software Assurance Maturity Model (OpenSAMM) and Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM).
• Define and recognize security configuration standards and benchmarks.
• Understand and describe security-focused configuration management processes.
• Recognize security milestones.
• Explain and illustrate incorporation of software security practices into the SDLC processes.
• Discuss security in predictive and adaptive planning for software development.
• Describe DevOps and DevSecOps.
• Describe System Security Plan.
• Recognize security-relevant documentation.
• Evaluate metrics in software development.
• Recognize attack surface evaluation for measuring security in software.
• Describe software decommissioning, end-of-life policy and processes.
• Discuss data disposition.
• Explain information system continuous monitoring (ISCM).
• Describe security information event management (SIEM).
• Recognize risk management terminology and describe the risk management process.
• Explain regulations and legal aspects pertaining to intellectual properties and security breaches.
• Discuss architectural risk assessment.
• Describe operational risks relevant to integration and deployment environment.
• Recognize the importance of personnel training.
• Describe security champions and discuss the importance of security education and guidance.
• Explain retrospectives and continuous improvement in Agile development environments.
  Discuss lessons learned with respect to the processes used to build software.

Chapter 3: Secure Software Requirements Domain

• Discuss requirements management and identify sources for software security requirements.
• Recognize functional and nonfunctional requirements and explain the importance of security-focused stories in SCRUM/SCRUM-like methodologies.
• Analyze misuse/abuse cases and recognize their relevance to known attack patterns.
• Describe Security Requirements Traceability Matrix (STRM) and discuss how security requirements flow down to suppliers/providers.
• Analyze security policies and their supporting elements as internal sources for security requirements.
• Explain compliance requirements and recognize laws, regulations and industry standards as external sources for security requirements.
• Discuss security standards and frameworks.
• Describe data governance, explain data ownership, and recognize relevant roles and responsibilities.
• Describe data classification and explain security labeling and marking.
• Recognize data types, structured and unstructured.
• Describe the data lifecycle and explain the process for secure data retention and destruction.
• Discuss privacy risk, recognize privacy laws and regulations, and explain the requirements for safeguarding personal information.
• Discuss data anonymization and enumerate various approaches for anonymization.
• Explain user consent, data retention and data disposition in the context of privacy.
• Recognize implications of cross-border data transfer and restrictions for the transfer of personal data.

Chapter 4: Secure Software Architecture and Design Domain

• Understand common threats; describe the threat modeling process, tools and methodologies and explain the process of attack surface evaluation and management.
• Discuss threat intelligence and describe the sources for cyber threat information.
• Discuss the process of identification and prioritization of security controls and describe security properties and constraints on the design and constraints imposed by the deployment environment.
• Describe various architectures and discuss their security-relevant aspects.
• Describe pervasive computing and IoT, discuss various contactless technologies and discuss their security and privacy aspects.
• Explain embedded software and discuss the update challenge and discuss Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and microcontroller security.
• Explain cloud computing, service models and deployment models, and describe the shared security responsibility model. Discuss mobile applications security.
• Discuss hardware platform concerns, side channel mitigation, speculative execution mitigation, and Hardware Security Modules (HSM).
• Explain cognitive computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• Discuss control systems and their applications in various areas and safety criticality aspects.
• Evaluate security criteria of interfaces, out-of-band management and log interfaces.
• Understand upstream and downstream dependencies, protocol design choices and their security ramifications.
• Describe various authentication and authorization mechanisms; explain credential management and the digital certificate standard.
• Discuss flow controls and data loss prevention; compare and contrast virtual machines and containers.
• Explain the trusted computing base (TCB) and the trusted platform module (TPM).
• Discuss database security, programming language environment, and operating system controls and services.
• Discuss secure architecture and secure design principles, and explain secure design patterns.
• Explain verification of the design, formal and informal secure code reviews and the code inspection process.

Chapter 5: Secure Software Implementation Domain

• Explain the need for establishing and enforcing secure coding standards.
• Describe different approaches for implementing security in managed applications.
• Describe common flaws in software and corresponding mitigation strategies.
• Discuss input validation, output encoding, authentication, session management, access control, cryptographic practices, error and exception management practices and logging.
• Explain type safety, memory management and isolation
• Discuss cryptography, applications to transit and storage, cryptographic agility, cryptographic libraries and encryption algorithm selection.
• Explain access control, trust zones and function permissions.
• Explain vulnerability databases and lists.
• Discuss Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), Common Weakness Enumerations (CWE) and Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC).
• Enumerate OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks.
• Describe categorization of controls by type and by function.
• Describe controls to prevent common web application vulnerabilities
• Describe OWASP Proactive Controls and critical focus areas around building secure software.
• Evaluate the risks associated with using third-party and open-source components and libraries.
• Describe Software Composition Analysis (SCA) and open source management.
• Discuss OWASP Dependency Check and Dependency Track.
• Discuss API integration and evaluate the security aspects.
• Describe system-of-systems.

Chapter 6: Secure Software Testing Domain

• Explain functional and nonfunctional security testing, purpose and the phases in penetration testing fuzzing and its variations and limitations.
• Explain vulnerability scanning and content scanning.
• Discuss simulation, understand configuration drifts in development environments and describe real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring.
• Describe fault injection, stress testing and break testing.
• Describe various types of functional testing, including unit testing, integration testing and regression testing.
• Describe various types of nonfunctional testing, including scalability, interoperability and performance testing.
• Describe cryptographic validation and explain Pseudo-Random Number Generators and entropy.
• Explain test strategy and describe functional and nonfunctional testing.
• Explain the relationship between use cases and misuse and abuse cases and the importance of creating misuse and abuse cases.
• Explain test strategy and describe functional and nonfunctional testing.
• Describe test cases and test harness.
• Explain black-box and white-box testing, objectives and code coverage.
• Discuss application security testing (AST) methods and explain their benefits and limitations.
• Discuss manual code reviews and describe searching for embedded malicious code.
• Recognize software security-relevant standards, explain crowdsourcing benefits and concerns and discuss bug bounty.
• Explain the security implications of test results on product management and prioritization of remediation efforts.
• Explain break-build criteria.
• Describe the process of tracking security defects.
• Explain risk scoring, and the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
• Explain generation of test data, security of test data, ramifications of using production data in the test environment and database referential integrity and constraints.
• Describe the process of verification and validation testing and explain acceptance testing.
• List various software documentation and explain undocumented functionality.
• Describe OWASP’s Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), its structure and its goals.

Chapter 7: Secure Software Deployment, Operations and Maintenance Domain

Learning Objectives

• Explain secure integration, build and deployment.
• Describe the secure software toolchain.
• Describe build artifacts and discuss mobile application and platform security.
• Describe security data, including credentials, keys and certificates and discuss ramifications of failing to protect them in production.
• Describe vaults used to manage secrets and discuss key vault considerations.
• Describe the secure bootstrapping process, hardening and the least privilege principle with respect to secure software installation.
• Explain secure software activation methods and security policy implementation with respect to secure software installation.
• Describe the Authorization to Operate (ATO) process and the steps involved.
• Explain risk acceptance.
• Explain post-deployment verification, issue tracking and testing constraints.
• Describe security testing automation.
• Describe the benefits of information security continuous monitoring(ISCM)and list some considerations for its implementation.
• Describe events, logs and threat intelligence.
• Explain computer security incidents, incident response and forensics.
• Describe incident precursors and indicators, monitoring logs and alerts and root-cause analysis.
• Describe security patch management and explain the timing, prioritization and testing aspects of security patches.
• Describe vulnerability management and vulnerability scan tools.
• Explain the operations of web application firewalls.
• Explain locality of reference, address space layout randomization and data execution prevention.
• Explain continuity of operations, business impact analysis, data backup and restore and data archiving.
• Discuss disaster recovery (DR), data residency requirement aspect of DR, resiliency and erasure code.

Chapter 8: Secure Software Supply Chain Domain

• Describe the software supply chain.
• Recognize participants in the supply chain.
• Explain software supply chain risk management​.
• Explain security risks associated with third party/open source code and recognize OWASP’s Software Component Verification Standard (SCVS).
• Describe software supply chain attacks.
• Explain the risks associated with peer-to-peer applications and file sharing.
• Explain code repository and build environment security.
• Explain cryptographically hashed, digitally signed components.
• Describe security in the acquisition process and audit of security policy compliance.
• Explain third-party vulnerability/incident notification and reporting and maintenance and support structure.
• Explain commercial and open-source software licenses.
• Explain vendor/supplier security track record in acquisition and the right-to-audit clause in contracts.
• Explain contractual requirements for intellectual property(IP) ownership inout sourcing relationships, code escrow, liability, warranty and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Chapter 9: Applied Scenario Activities

Learning Objectives

• Apply security through the SDLC via animated video-based scenarios and corresponding activities.

CSSLP Certification Exam Details:

In order to take the CSSLP certification exam, candidates must register with (ISC)².

• Number of questions: 175
• Passing score: 700 points or greater
• Test duration: 4 Hours
• Test format: Multiple choice
• Test delivery: Pearson Vue

CSSLP Certification Exam Domains:

• Domain 1: Secure Software Concepts
• Domain 2: Secure Software Requirements
• Domain 3: Secure Software Architecture and Design
• Domain 4: Secure Software Implementation
• Domain 5: Secure Software Testing
• Domain 6: Secure Software Lifecycle Management
• Domain 7: Secure Software Deployment, Operations, Maintenance
• Domain 8: Secure Software Supply Chain

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