Secure Software Development

This course is a part of Secure Software Development Fundamentals, a 3-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Modern software is under constant attack, but many software developers have never been told how to effectively counter those attacks. This course works to solve that problem, by explaining the fundamentals of developing secure software. Geared towards software developers, DevOps professionals, software engineers, web application developers, and others interested in learning how to develop secure software, this course focuses on practical steps that can be taken, even with limited resources to improve information security. This course will enable software developers to create and maintain systems that are much harder to successfully attack, reduce the damage when attacks are successful, and speed the response so that any latent vulnerabilities can be rapidly repaired.

This course focuses on key implementation issues: input validation (such as why allowlists should be used and not denylists), processing data securely, calling out to other programs, sending output, and error handling. It focuses on practical steps that you (as a developer) can take to counter the most common kinds of attacks.

This is the second of the three courses in the Secure Software Development Fundamentals Professional Certificate program, and was developed by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a project of the Linux Foundation focused on securing the open source ecosystem.

What you'll learn

• Implementation: You’ll learn how to implement much more secure software. This includes how to do Input validation, process data securely, call out to other programs, and send output. You’ll also learn about more specialized approaches, including some basics of cryptography and handling problems (such as error-handling code).