Security & Sustainability

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From the course by Vanderbilt University

Engineering Maintainable Android Apps

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Vanderbilt University

Engineering Maintainable Android Apps

119 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Android App Development

Engineering Maintainable Android Apps, which is a 4 week MOOC that shows by example various methods for engineering maintainable Android apps, including test-driven development methods and how to develop/run unit tests using JUnit and Robotium (or equivalent automated testing frameworks for Android), as well as how to successfully apply common Java/Android software patterns to improve the extensibility and clarity of Android apps. Students will work on the appropriate automated unit quizzes, based on the material covered in the lecture videos. These lessons will demonstrate the benefits of good software engineering practices that are targeted at creating maintainable code for mobile apps. There will be roughly 3-4 hours of student engagement time per week, including video lectures, and quizzes. The ordering of the modules within the course is designed to be flexible. In particular, students can watch the videos in whatever order suits their experience and needs, e.g., they may want to watch the unit testing videos prior to the software pattern videos if they prefer to learn about unit testing first.

From the lesson

Security & Sustainability I

Security & Sustainability3:48

Economy of Mechanism4:10

Economy of Mechanism Example17:04

Least Privilege6:26

Least Privilege Example7:02

Complete Mediation3:10

Complete Mediation Example8:41

Secure Defaults5:35

Secure Defaults Example7:29

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt
Professor of Computer Science and Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Program
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Michael Walker
Instructor - Graduate Student pursuing PhD in Computer Science
EECS
Dr. Jules White
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

We're going to talk about sustainability in the context of security now.

For any app or other application to be successful, it's going to have go and

live through a whole bunch of different versions.

It's going to have all kinds of outside external influences on that app.

It's going to interact with users.

It's going to interact with other systems.

New things are going to emerge.

It's constantly going to be facing different pressures from the outside.

And one of the pressures that it's going to always face is security and attacks.

So we will always want to make sure that we are prepared to handle

this aspect of our app sustainability and evolution of over time.

The security of our app.

Now, why is security so tightly interwoven with sustainability?

Well, unfortunately, we don't live in a world where nothing bad ever happens.

Unfortunately cyber attacks are reality, and we have to make sure that, when we're

designing software, we try to think about our users and really care about our users.

Because when we build software for other people, or other organizations,

and we accidentally create security vulnerabilities in them, we are inevitably

exposing them, and potentially their really personal information,

or their really private operations, or intellectual property.

Or we're potentially exposing some really important system, like a power grid.

So we want to make sure that we really take that into account when we're

designing our application, and

make security an important aspect of our design and evolution.

Now, another reason we want to do this is, if you want to just think selfishly about

it, if your app, if some version of your app is shown to be insecure.

So suddenly we see here, and

there's some vulnerability that's discovered in your app.

And it's discovered, it's widely known that it's highly vulnerable.

Your users are going to flee from that version of that app.

They're going to stop using it.

And so, unless you can quickly fix and mitigate that vulnerability and

take care of it, your app will not be sustainable.

It will no longer be used.

It will essentially die at that point in time.

So another thing to think about is if a vulnerability is discovered,

you've then impacted all these users.

And the impact could be so

damaging that then no one wants to use your app because of the risk of using it.

Or, if a vulnerability is discovered and it takes you so long to go and

fix that vulnerability that the users are really upset by it,

they may not come back and use your app when you have fixed it.

They may just abandon it altogether and

switch to something else that does take security vulnerability seriously And

make it so that they can evolve quickly to fix security vulnerabilities.

So security and making sure your app is secure is

absolutely a critical aspect of sustainability.

If you can't go from one version to another without guaranteeing or

trying to account for security, and when security problems are found,

if you can't quickly fix them, your app is not going to be sustainable.

People aren't going to use it.

And you're also going to cause damage with your app if you're not

thinking through the security aspects.

So we really want to make security an important aspect of sustainability.

And it's a critical part of software development.

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