Application Security and Development (STIG)

Application Security and Development is a lab-intensive, hands-on application security training course essential for developers, designers, architects, QA, Testing, and other personnel who need to deliver secure applications within the DoD. In addition to teaching basic programming skills, this course digs deep into sound processes and practices that apply to the entire software development lifecycle. In this course, students thoroughly examine best practices for defensively coding applications, including XML processing and web services. Students will repeatedly attack and then defend various assets associated with a fully-functional application. This hands-on approach drives home the mechanics of how to secure applications in the most practical of terms.Security experts agree that the least effective approach to security is "penetrate and patch". It is far more effective to "bake" security into an application throughout its lifecycle. After spending significant time trying to defend a poorly designed (from a security perspective) web application, developers are ready to learn how to build secure web applications starting at project inception. The final portion of this course builds on the previously learned mechanics for building defenses by exploring how design and analysis can be used to build stronger applications from the beginning of the software lifecycle.