Assurance and certification in secure Multi-party Open Software and Services

Continuous, distributed changes rule today's European Digital Single Market as no single company does master its own national, in-house software. Software is mostly assembled from “the internet” and more than half come from Open Source Software repositories (some in Europe, most elsewhere). Security & privacy assurance, verification and process certification techniques designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes in weeks, happening in sub-components and decided by third-party developers one did not even know existed.

AssureMOSS addresses these challenges to the fullest extent: «Open Source Software - Designed Everywhere, Secured in Europe». AssureMOSS proposes to switch from a process-based to an artefact-based security evaluation by supporting all phases of the continuous software lifecycle (Design, Develop, Deploy, Evaluate and back) and their artefacts (Models, Source code, Container images, Services). The key idea is to support mechanisms for lightweight and scalable screenings applicable automatically to the entire population of software components by

- Machine intelligent identification of security issues across artifacts,
- Sound analysis and verification of changes by tracing the security and privay side effects,
- Business insight by risk analysis and security evaluation.

This approach supports fast-paced development of better software by a new notion: continuous (re)certification. The project will generate not only a set of innovative methods and open source tools but also benchmark datasets with thousands of vulnerabilities and code that can be used by other researchers.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952647.