Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

Societal-scale software systems, such as today’s commercial social media platforms, are among the most widely used software systems in the world, with some platforms reporting billions of daily active users. These systems have created new mechanisms for global communication and connect people with unprecedented speed. Despite the numerous benefits of societal-scale systems, these systems are designed to optimize user engagement and scale by using psychology (such as gaming and reward mechanisms) to influence users. Individual users struggle with privacy of their data and bias in these systems, while governments face new threats of misinformation. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, John Robert and Forrest Shull discuss issues that must be considered when engineering societal-scale systems.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Gregory J. Touhill, director of the SEI CERT Division, talks with Suzanne Miller about secure by design, secure by default, a longstanding tenet of the work of the SEI and CERT in particular. The SEI has been in the forefront of secure software development, promoting an approach where security weaknesses are addressed, prevented, or eliminated earlier in the software development lifecycle, which not only helps to ensure secure systems, but also saves time and money. Touhill also discusses the CERT strategy in support of SEI sponsors in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and his vision for the future of cybersecurity and the role of the CERT Division.

Secure by design means performing more security and assurance activities earlier in the product and system lifecycles. A secure-by-design mindset addresses the security of systems during the requirements, design, and development phases of lifecycles rather than waiting until the system is ready for implementation. The need for a secure-by-design mindset is exacerbated by the amount of interconnectedness of today’s systems and the increasing amount of automation that characterizes system development. These trends have led to increased levels of risk and made implementation of security controls during test and patching systems after deployment increasingly unsustainable. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Robert Schiela, technical manager of the Secure Coding group, and Carol Woody, a principal researcher in the SEI’s CERT Division, talk with Suzanne Miller about the importance of integrating the practices and mindset of secure by design into the acquisition and development of software-reliant systems.

Like all technical debt, enterprise technical debt consists of choices expedient in the short term, but often problematic over the long term. In enterprise technical debt, the impact reaches beyond the scope of a single system or project. Because ignoring enterprise technical debt can have significant consequences, software and systems architects should be alert for it, and they should not let it get overlooked or ignored when they come across it. Enterprise technical debt often results in multi-project or organization-wide risks that increase the organization’s cost, efficiency, or security risks. Remediation of enterprise technical debt requires intervention by governance structures whose scope is broader than that of individual teams or projects. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Stephany Bellomo, a principal engineer in the SEI’s Software Solutions Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about identifying and remediating enterprise technical debt.

The recent growth of applications that leverage large language models, including ChatGPT and Copilot, has spurred reactions ranging from fear and uncertainty to adoration and lofty expectations. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Jay Palat, senior engineer and technical director of AI for mission, and Dr. Rachel Dzombak, senior advisor to the director of the SEI’s AI Division, discuss the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), common misconceptions about LLMs, how to leverage tools built on top of LLMs, and the need for critical thinking around both the outputs of the tools and the trends in their use.

DevSecOps practices, including continuous-integration/continuous-delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, enable organizations to respond to security and reliability events quickly and efficiently and to produce resilient and secure software on a predictable schedule and budget. Despite growing evidence and recognition of the efficacy and value of these practices, the initial implementation and ongoing improvement of the methodology can be challenging. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, senior engineers Vanessa Jackson and Lyndsi Hughes discuss with principal researcher Suzanne Miller the DevSecOps adoption framework, which guides organizations in the planning and implementation of a roadmap to functional CI/CD pipeline capabilities.

Rust is growing in popularity. Its unique security model promises memory safety and concurrency safety, while providing the performance of C/C++. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), David Svoboda and Joe Sible, both engineers in the SEI’s CERT Division, talk with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about the Rust programming language and its security-related features. Svoboda and Sible discuss Rust’s compile-time safety guarantees, the kinds of vulnerabilities that Rust fixes and those that it does not, situations in which users would not want to use Rust, and where interested users can go to get more information about the Rust programming language.

Coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) begins when at least one individual becomes aware of a vulnerability, but it can’t proceed without the cooperation of many. Software supply chains, software libraries, and component vulnerabilities have evolved in complexity and have become as much a part of the CVD process as vulnerabilities in vendors’ proprietary code. Many CVD cases now require coordination across multiple vendors. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Allen Householder, a senior vulnerability and incident researcher in the SEI’s CERT Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about Vultron, a protocol for multi-party coordinated vulnerability disclosure (MPCVD).

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Dr. Carol Woody, a principal researcher in the SEI's CERT Division, talks with Suzanne Miller about the SEI’s newly released Acquisition Security Framework, which helps programs coordinate the management of engineering and supply-chain risks across system components including hardware, network interfaces, software interfaces, and mission capabilities.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Scott Hissam, a researcher within the SEI’s Software Solutions Division who works on software assurance in Department of Defense (DoD) systems, talks with Linda Parker Gates, initiative lead for the SEI’s Software Acquisition Pathways, about the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) in the DoD, building on insights that surfaced in a recent workshop held for producers and consumers of FOSS for DoD systems.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Dr. Sam Procter and Lutz Wrage, researchers with the SEI, discuss the Guided Architecture Trade Space Explorer (GATSE), a new SEI-developed model-based tool to help with the design of safety-critical systems. The GATSE tool allows engineers to evaluate more design options in less time than they can now. This prototype language extension and software tool partially automates the process of model-based systems engineering so that systems engineers can rapidly explore combinations of different design options.

In aiming for correctness and security of product, as well as for development speed, software development teams often face tension in their objectives. During a recent customer engagement that involved the development of a continuous-integration (CI) pipeline, developers wanted to develop features and deploy to production, deferring non-critical bugs as technical debt, whereas cyber engineers wanted compliant software by having the pipeline fail on any security requirement that was not met. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Alejandro Gomez, a researcher in the SEI’s CERT Division who worked on the customer project, talked with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about how the team explored—and eventually resolved—the two competing forces of developer velocity and cybersecurity enforcement by implementing DevSecOps practices.

In aiming for correctness and security of product, as well as for development speed, software development teams often face tension in their objectives. During a recent customer engagement that involved the development of a continuous-integration (CI) pipeline, developers wanted to develop features and deploy to production, deferring non-critical bugs as technical debt, whereas cyber engineers wanted compliant software by having the pipeline fail on any security requirement that was not met....

The shift to a cloud environment provides significant benefits. Cloud resources can be scaled quickly, updated frequently, and widely accessed without geographic limitations. Realizing these benefits, however, requires organizations to manage associated organizational and technical risks. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Chris Alberts, principal cybersecurity analyst in the SEI’s CERT Division, discusses with principal researcher Suzanne Miller a prototype set of cloud adoption risk factors and describes a method that managers can employ to assess their cloud initiatives against these risk factors.

Competitive pressures in many domains, as well as development paradigms such as Agile and DevSecOps, have led to the increasingly common practice of continuous delivery or continuous deployment where frequent updates to software systems are rapidly and reliably fielded. In today’s systems, releases can occur at any time—possibly hundreds of releases per day—and each can be instigated by a different team within an organization. Being able to release frequently means that bug fixes and security patches do not have to wait until the next scheduled release, but rather can be made and released as soon as a bug is discovered and fixed. It also means that new features can be put into production at any time and don’t have to wait to be bundled into a release. In this podcast, Rick Kazman, an SEI visiting scientist and coauthor of Software Architecture in Practice, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about using patterns for software deployability. These patterns fall into two broad categories: complete replacement of services and canary testing.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Thomas Podnar and Dustin Updyke, both senior cybersecurity engineers with the SEI’s CERT Division, discuss their work to apply machine learning to increase the realism of non-player characters (NPCs) in cyber training exercises.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Douglass Post and Richard Kendall, authors of "Creating and Using Virtual Prototyping Software: Principles and Practices" discuss with principal researcher Suzanne Miller experiences and insights that they gleaned from applying virtual prototyping in CREATE (Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments), a multiyear DoD program to develop and deploy software for systems like ships, air vehicles, ground vehicles, and radio-frequency antennas. CREATE enabled engineers and scientists to design these complex systems and to accurately predict their performance.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, visiting scientist Rick Kazman and principal researcher Suzanne Miller discuss software architecture patterns and the effect that certain architectural patterns have on quality attributes, such as availability and robustness. Kazman also provides examples of mechanisms—such as architectural tactics and patterns—and the effects they have on availability and robustness, especially in cloud-based systems.

DevSecOps encompasses all the best software engineering principles known today with an emphasis on faster delivery through increased collaboration of all stakeholders resulting in more secure, useable, and higher-quality software systems. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, researchers Tim Chick and Joe Yankel present a DevSecOps Platform-Independent Model (PIM), which uses model based systems engineering (MBSE) to formalize the practices of DevSecOps pipelines and organize relevant guidance. This first-of-its-kind model gives software development enterprises the structure and articulation needed for creating, maintaining, securing, and improving DevSecOps pipelines.

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Jason Larkin and Daniel Justice, researchers in the SEI’s AI Division, discuss a paper outlining their efforts to simulate the performance of Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for the Max-Cut problem and compare it with some of the best classical alternatives, for exact, approximate, and heuristic solutions.