A recent Google survey found that many developers felt comfortable using the Rust programming language in two months or less. Yet barriers to Rust adoption remain, particularly in safety-critical systems, where features such as memory and processing power are in short supply and compliance with regulations is mandatory. In our latest podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Vaughn Coates, an engineer in the SEI’s Software Solutions Division, sits down with Joe Yankel, initiative Lead of the DevSecOps Innovations team at the SEI, to discuss the barriers and benefits of Rust adoption.

In response to Executive Order (EO) 14028, Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended 11 practices for software verification. Threat modeling is at the top of the list. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Natasha Shevchenko and Alex Vesey, both engineers with the SEI’s CERT Division, sit down with Timothy Chick, technical manager of CERT’s Applied Systems Group, to discuss how threat modeling can be used to protect software-intensive systems from attack. Specifically, they explore how threat models can guide system requirements, system design, and operational choices to identify and mitigate threats.

Container images are increasingly being used as the main method for software deployment, so ensuring the reproducibility of container images is becoming a critical step in protecting the software supply chain. In practice, however, builds are often not reproducible due to elements of the build environment that rely on nondeterministic factors such as timestamps and external dependencies. Lack of reproducibility can lead to lack of trust, broken builds, and possibly mask hidden malware insertion. Vessel, a recent tool from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Institute (SEI), helps developers identify the difference between two container images to help sort benign from problematic issues. In this SEI Podcast, Kevin Pitstick, a senior software engineer at the SEI and Vessel’s lead developer, and Lihan Zhan, a software engineer at the SEI working on tactical and AI-enabled systems, sit down with Grace Lewis, lead of the Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems (TAS) applied research and development team at the SEI, to discuss the Vessel tool, its development, and application in mission-critical settings.