February 27, 2024 at 03:27PM
The US government is urging software manufacturers to release timely, comprehensive documentation of security vulnerabilities to enhance efforts in measuring code quality and safety. The White House emphasizes the need for long-term investment incentives and the adoption of memory-safe programming languages to improve cybersecurity across the digital ecosystem. This industry-wide effort aims to anticipate and mitigate vulnerabilities before software release.
Based on the meeting notes, the US government is emphasizing the need for software manufacturers to transparently document security vulnerabilities using Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) data and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) to create empirical metrics for measuring the quality and safety of code. The government underscored the importance of realigning incentives to favor long-term investments and encouraging the adoption of memory-safe programming languages to reduce vulnerabilities at scale. It also highlighted the need for ongoing efforts to improve software quality and security, including coordinated vulnerability disclosure and response programs, as well as timely CVE records. The government emphasized that measuring and evaluating software security is crucial, particularly in addressing the hardest open research problem of software measurability, and called for persistent, multi-sector focus in proactive efforts to eliminate entire categories of software vulnerabilities.