Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Webcast Series

Threat modeling is intended to help defend a system from attack. It tops the list of techniques recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to secure critical systems. In a world where people with malicious intent have deadlier tools at their disposal, defenders need to take advantage of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) to form mitigation strategies effective from early in the systems engineering lifecycle. This webcast will preview a workshop to be held during the 2025 Secure Software by Design conference to be held on August 19 and 20.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How MBSE can aid cybersecurity analysis and design
• The value of MBSE for cyber threat modeling
• An overview of threat modeling techniques using MBSE

DevSecOps generates a lot of data valuable for better decision making. However, decision makers may not see all they need to in order to make best use of the data for continuous improvement. The SEI open source Polar tool unlocks the data, giving DevSecOps teams greater capability to automate, which in turn means they can innovate rapidly – without lessening quality or reducing security.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Issues from complex DevSecOps pipelines
• What observability adds for DevSecOps efforts
• The way in which a new open-source tool, Polar, helps

Organizations looking to build and adopt artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled systems face the challenge of identifying the right capabilities and tools to support Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) pipelines. Navigating the wide range of available tools can be especially difficult for organizations new to AI or those that have not yet deployed systems at scale. This webcast introduces the MLOps Tool Evaluation Rubric, designed to help acquisition teams pinpoint organizational priorities for MLOps tooling, customize rubrics to evaluate those key capabilities, and ultimately select tools that will effectively support ML developers and systems throughout the entire lifecycle, from exploratory data analysis to model deployment and monitoring. This webcast will walk viewers through the rubric's design and content, share lessons learned from applying the rubric in practice, and conclude with a brief demo.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• How to identify and prioritize key capabilities for MLOps tooling within their organizations

• How to customize and apply the MLOps Tool Evaluation Rubric to evaluate potential tools effectively

• Best practices and lessons learned from real-world use of the rubric in AI projects

DevSecOps practices foster collaboration among software development, security, and operations teams to build, test, and release software quickly and reliably. A high-stakes, high-security environment has challenged the implementation of these practices within the Department of Defense (DoD). The DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) organization partnered with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to conduct the first study to baseline the state of DoD DevSecOps, highlight successes, and offer insights for next steps. George Lamb, DoD's Director of Cloud and Software Modernization, joins the SEI team to discuss key results and how they will help the DoD ensure that its software ecosystem is effective, scalable, and adaptable to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• Highlights from important success stories in DoD's DevSecOps journey
• How the DoD is harvesting grassroot successes by individual software organizations to implement those successes at scale
• Keys to using data and building effective measurement strategies to enable optimization of software delivery

Did you know there are 500 million tweets per day? 3 billion monthly active Facebook users? 1 billion LinkedIn members? Are you one of them? In this webcast, Destiney Marie Plaza reveals how a hacker can use seemingly benign public information to customize an attack on a victim by showing a scenario-based attack and demo (using free and open-source tools). Additionally, you will learn how hackers can gather information about you, common mistakes that put your information at risk, and how to protect yourself.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• how to use open-source tools used to crack passwords, along with a methodology for how hackers may gain access to your accounts
• what makes a strong password and how such passwords can stave off automated cracking tools
• how a hacker sees you, so that you can take appropriate steps to protect yourself

Today, we have seen our national security organizations working to adopt modern software practices, particularly Agile methods and DevSecOps practices, efforts challenged by a mismatch of tempos between operational needs and development processes. The newly mandated Software Acquisition Pathway helps to align those tempos. However, to sustain a competitive advantage through software, we need to see our defense organizations recall and reapply disciplined engineering practices.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• An assessment of current efforts to adopt modern software practices
• Why and where the pace of adoption faces challenges
• Characteristics of the needed new level of performance

An organization's cyber risk management practices must be rooted in organizational goals to be truly effective. In this webcast, Matt Butkovic, Greg Crabbe and Beth-Anne Bygum explore how best to align business and resilience objectives.

The Defense Industrial Base (DIB) is a core element of the national security ecosystem. This point of intersection between private industry and the Department of Defense is a perpetual target for the Nation's adversaries. In this Intersect, Matthew Butkovic and John Haller explore the development, and implementation, of the Cyber Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) as a means to better protect the DIB.

When it comes to recognizing threats, cybersecurity professionals may become distracted by big promises or ignore some obvious inspections. New claims made by the latest and greatest new apps draw attention away from network situational awareness best practices—like a dog distracted when it spots a squirrel. We also may deviate from making routine inspections that point toward further investigation—overlooking obvious needs right under our noses. Either becoming distracted or missing obvious inspections can cause us not to detect threats.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• The distinction between anomalies and threats

• Steps to analyze data to detect a threat

• The benefits of completing work on one threat

Can a cybersecurity parametric cost estimation model be developed? Every Department of Defense (DoD) program needs to account for, credibly estimate, budget/plan for, and assess the performance of its cybersecurity activities. Creating a cybersecurity parametric model would allow DoD programs to reliably estimate the effort and cost of cybersecurity activities, estimate an overall cybersecurity cost for a program, and obtain a defined and normalized set of cybersecurity data. In this webcast, Christopher Miller shares insights from a Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute study on cybersecurity cost estimating that can help national security organizations successfully deploy parametric cost modeling.

What Attendees Will Learn:

• a proposed work breakdown structure identifying cybersecurity-related activities and cost items, and existing descriptions of secure coding practices and levels of rigor for those practices based on data availability

• an approach to develop a cybersecurity parametric cost model

• a methodology to develop the cost model