SWAMP, the Software Assurance Marketplace
I recently took a fresh look at the “SWAMP”, the Software Assurance Marketplace– it is a great idea and a valuable resource. The short and incomplete story is that SWAMP is a suite of software analysis tools integrated into a centralized, cloud-based software testing environment- and it is available to software developers, software tool developers, and researchers- for free.
From their website:
“Software is a crucial component of daily living, affecting worldwide economic structures and the services we depend on every day. With the increasing rate of security breaches, it is clear that conventional network security solutions are no longer able to defend our privacy, corporate data, and critical banking information. Today’s applications need to be built more securely at the code level, and that code needs to be tested regularly.
The SWAMP was developed to make it much easier to regularly test the security of these applications and to provide an online laboratory for software assessment tool inventors to build stronger tools. Testing is often complicated and challenging, because comprehensive testing requires the use of several disparate tools with no central means of managing the process. The SWAMP is a no-cost, high-performance, centralized cloud computing platform that includes an array of open-source and commercial software security testing tools, as well as a comprehensive results viewer to simplify vulnerability remediation. A first in the industry, the SWAMP also offers a library of applications with known vulnerabilities, enabling tool developers to improve the effectiveness of their own static and dynamic testing tools. Created to advance the state of cybersecurity, protect critical infrastructures, and improve the resilience of open-source software, the SWAMP integrates security into the software development life cycle and keeps all user activities completely confidential.”
The current test environment is able to test software written in C/C++, Java (including Java on Android), Ruby and Python- with JavaScript and PHP in development. SWAMP will support eight languages by the end of the year. There are currently sixteen tools in the suite with more being added, and numerous commercial companies are participating- including Veracode, CodeDX, Goanna, GrammaTech, and Parasoft.
The Marketplace team includes some serious academic centers for technology, the Morgridge Institute and the Department of Computer Sciences at U of Wisconsin-Madison, the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In my conversation with Bart Miller and Miron Livny of SWAMP it was clear that this project was built for practical use in the real-world, it is not an academic exercise- this is immensely practical and useful stuff.
There are many more details on their background page, including some impressive tech specs (at least I consider 700 cores, 5 TB of RAM, and 104 TB of HDD impressive).
We are going to try to get folks from SWAMP on the Security Weekly Podcast to discuss the marketplace in depth. Stay tuned for more on that.
Jack