Source Code Reviews: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (G22b)
At some point during the development and validation of a cryptographic module, it is expected that the vendor’s certification expert(s) will have to perform at least one review of the module’s software and the source code of which it is comprised. This can be a very daunting task considering that the module may consist of millions of lines of codes, has potentially been written in several programming languages over a period of years by a number of disparate development teams, and that your program manager will afford you at best just a few days to successfully accomplish this task.
How can you realistically be expected to determine if the module is ready to be released to an outside testing lab for certification, let alone a governmental certification body for intense scrutiny? The trick (if it can be described as such) is to do a great deal of preparation prior to the actual source code review(s). This presentation shall both consider and propose a number of techniques which can transform this effort from an impending tragedy to a masterful triumph.