Create a Market for Safe, Secure Software

Tuesday, November 22, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)
Speaker: 
  • L. Jean Camp
l jean camp headshot on blue background

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Andrew Grotto, in conversation with L. Jean Camp for Create a Market for Safe, Secure Software

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

Today the security market, particularly in embedded software and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is a lemons market.  Buyers simply cannot distinguish between secure and insecure products. To enable the market for secure high quality products to thrive,  buyers need to have some knowledge of the contents of these digital products. Once purchased, ensuring a product or software package remains safe requires knowing if these include publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Again this requires knowledge of the contents.  When consumers do not know the contents of their digital products, they can not know if they are at risk and need to take action.

The Software Bill of Materials  is a proposal that was identified as a critical instrument for meeting these challenges and securing software supply chains in the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity} by the Biden Administration (EO 14028. In this presentation Camp will introduce SBOMs, provide examples, and explain the components that are needed in the marketplace for this initiative to meet its potential.

Jean Camp is a Professor at Indiana University with appointments in Informatics and Computer Science.  She is a Fellow of the AAAS (2017), the IEEE (2018), and the ACM (2021).  She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School. A year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon she served as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station after a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics, followed by a MSEE in optoelectronics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.