Developer Ecosystems for Software Safety

How to design and implement information systems so that they are safe and secure is a complex topic. Both high-level design principles and implementation guidance for software safety and security are well established and broadly accepted. For example, Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder's seminal overview of principles of secure design was published almost 50 years ago, and various community and governmental bodies have published comprehensive best practices about how to avoid common software weaknesses. This article argues, based on experience at Google, that focusing on developer ecosystems is both practical and effective, and can achieve a drastic reduction in the rate of common classes of defects across hundreds of applications being developed by thousands of developers.