Workshop on secure software development

Islamabad

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) organised a daylong workshop on 'Secure Software Development' in collaboration with Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), Pakistan Software Houses Association (PASHA), and PIEAS on Thursday.

In his opening remarks, HEC Executive Director Dr. Arshad Ali highlighted the significance of software security and the security of other information technology (IT) systems and stressed on the need for holding such workshops in universities for IT students. “The HEC will continue to support such activities for students,” he added.       

 Speaking about workshop objectives, Dr. Irfan-ul-Haq, president of the CSA Pakistan, shed light on cloud computing and the CSA contributions towards software security. He said that since the establishment of CSA in 2014, it is putting efforts to boost the culture of cloud technology in Pakistan. He said the CSA Global is likely to hold an international summit in Islamabad in 2017 on software certification.

 The workshop, attended by people from academia and IT research and development institutions, covered various dimensions of software security, web application security, control of cyber attacks, and principles of secure application designs. Some real life security case studies were also presented during the activity.

Resource person of the workshop Israr Khan said that amid the fast growth of IT sector, software security has become need of the hour. He said that proper upgradation of the modern software security systems is necessary to protect data on IT networks. He briefed the participants about different types of security threats, reasons to bother them, motivation of hackers, and methods of their mitigation.  In his closing remarks, PIEAS Rector Dr. Muhammad Aslam appreciated the HEC and other entities for holding the workshop as it brought the academia and representatives of IT sector to a single platform to discuss the prevailing software security threats.   Later, Dr. Arshad Ali distributed certificates among the workshop participants.