The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: A Story of (In)secure Software Development

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a security assessment performed on a home care system based on SOA, realized as web services. The security design concepts of this platform were specifically tailored to meet new security challenges and to be compliant with legal frameworks applicable to the healthcare domain. This security design was fed as input to the development team,which implemented the system. However, our assessment revealed a software platform with severe security weaknesses and vulnerabilities, demonstrating pitfalls that are, or should be, well known.Our experience re-confirms that security must be built as an intrinsic software property and emphasizes the need for security awareness throughout the whole software development lifecycle.