Realizing the Advantages of the Digital Age ... Top training tips ... Standards and compliance

This month, we're bringing you a feature interview with Brian Chess, chief scientist and co-founder of Fortify Software. Chess talks about his background, breaches, Howard Schmidt and Fortify's accomplishments in 2009.

In this month's best advice column --Top Training Tips -- readers offer suggestions on how to reboot a training curriculum, given the increased threats to application security.

One reader manages a team of developers and needs advice on complying with security standards. Are you familiar with FISMA standards? Please share your thoughts with us on how this manager can best keep his team in compliance.

Also, let us know how successful we are at including articles relevant to you by taking a one-minute reader survey. We'll be giving away three T-shirts. You could win one for answering the survey, for answering this month's dilemma or for submitting a question that could be used as a dilemma.

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Interview with Brian Chess:

Realizing the Advantages of the Digital Age 

Just after the New Year, the editors of Federal Software Security Advisory sat down with Brian Chess, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Fortify Software, to get his insight on the past, present and future of software security.

Brian, let's start at the beginning. Tell us how you got involved in software security?

"Back in 1995, I was finishing my Master's at the University of California at Santa Cruz and working on circuit design problems at Hewlett Packard when a handful of random events converged and led me to the world of static analysis and software security. First, I came across the book Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier and thought it was really cool. I wasn't ready to turn around at that point in my education and pick up all the math that was necessary to become a cryptographer, but I clearly saw a relationship between circuit design problems and cryptography problems. Read more