About The Secure Code Alliance

The Secure Code Alliance (SCA) was formed in 2021 to address the need that organizations have to ensure its developers are aware of and implement Secure Software Development Practices (SSDP) in order to minimize the threat posed by malicious actors against the organization’s applications, services and processes. 

The SCA’s conformity assessment is the Developing Security & Privacy by Design (DSPD) initiative. The DSPD is an effort to promote transdisciplinary competency for developers to deliver trustworthy Applications, Services and Processes (ASP). This concept of competency is focused on a practitioner’s or architect’s ability to:

• Work with stakeholders to ensure that security objectives, protection needs/concerns, security requirements and associated validation methods are defined;

• Define security and privacy requirements, including associated verification methods;

• Develop security views and viewpoints of the system architecture and design;

• Identify and assess susceptibilities and vulnerabilities to lifecycle hazards and adversities;

• Design proactive and reactive features and functions encompassed within a balanced strategy to control asset loss and associated loss consequences;

• Provide security considerations to inform systems engineering efforts with the objective to reduce errors, flaws and weaknesses that may constitute a security vulnerability;

• Perform system security analyses and interprets the results of system security-relevant analyses in support of decision-making for engineering trades and risk management;

• Identify, quantify and evaluate the costs and benefits of security features and functions and considerations to inform assessments of alternative solutions, engineering trade-offs and risk treatment decisions;

• Demonstrate through evidence-based reasoning that security and trustworthiness claims for the system have been satisfied; and

• Leverage multiple security and other specialties to address all feasible solutions.