As part of its ongoing commitment to Bill Gates’ vision of Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft officially adopted important security- and privacy-related disciplines to its software development process. These changes, called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) have led to a demonstrable reduction in security vulnerabilities in products such as Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system and its SQL Server 2005 database. The purpose of this article is not to describe the SDL in detail, but to outline some of the practical defensive measurements in use at Microsoft required by the SDL. If Microsoft’s SDL is new to you, refer to the sidebar, “A Brief SDL Overview.”

At STSC.

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