State-of-the-Art Reports (SOARs)

SOARs are CSIAC publications that provide in-depth analysis of current technologies, research, and the latest technical information available on a topic within any of the CSIAC technical focus areas.

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The Insider Threat to Information Systems

The insider threat provides a comprehensive examination of the current state-of-the-art in addressing it as it pertains to information technology systems. This SOAR provides an overview of how the insider threat is defined and viewed…

Enhancing the Development Life Cycle to Produce Secure Software

Enhancing the Development Life Cycle to Produce Secure Software answers the questions of why software security is important, why so much software is not secure, and the risks posed to systems that contain non-secure software….

A Business Case for Software Process Improvement (2007 Update), Measuring Return on Investment from Software Engineering and Management

The purpose of this revised State-of-the-Art Report (SOAR) is to provide new insights into the details necessary to demonstrate from a business perspective the benefits of improved software management using software process improvement (SPI) techniques….

Software Project Management for Software Assurance

This report presents information on how the need for software assurance affects software project management. The impact of software assurance on the tasks and concerns of a project manager are addressed, first in terms of…

Software Security Assurance

This State-of-the-Art Report (SOAR) describes the current state of software security assurance. It provides an overview of the current state of the environment in which defense and national security software must operate and then surveys…

Department of Defense (DoD) Information Assurance (IA) and Computer Network Defense (CND) Strategies

The purpose of this State-of-the-Art (SOAR) Report, is to provide an objective, summarized depiction, across a number of published and draft strategies, plans, roadmaps, initiatives, and reference-capabilities documents, of DoD’s technical-capability needs, challenges, and solutions…

Embedded Software Maintenance

The goal of this report is to describe the state-of-the-art of embedded software maintenance and provide a glimpse of state-of-the-practice embedded maintenance practices. Section 2 introduces the area of embedded software based on embedded systems,…

Agile Software Development

The purpose of this report is to address this interest and provide a comprehensive overview of the current State-of-the-Art as well as State-of-the-Practice for Agile Methods. The first section discusses the history behind the trend,…

Malicious Code

This SOAR, which updates earlier reports to DoD on the subject of malicious code, describes common detection, and prevention techniques, and provides pointers to resources for enhancing organizational information security. This update was considered necessary…

Exploring Biotechnology: Opportunities for the Department of Defense

(.mil/.gov ONLY) Biotechnology has revolutionary potential for a broad range of U.S. military capabilities. Further, because of the United State’s unparalleled lead in research and development, biotechnology presents the opportunity to recast the framework of…

Measuring the Effects of Network Centric Warfare: Exploring Belief Metrics in Warfare Critical Review & Technology Assessment (CR/TA) Report

This report is the second in a series, which identifies key metrics for measuring the effects of network-centric warfare (NCW). Volume I introduced two sets of metrics associated with the Reason (i.e., Command and Control)…

Software Tools for Knowledge Management

A variety of software tools for knowledge management have become available, some commercial and some academic. Not all tools that are labeled KM tools are indeed KM tools; their vendors attempt to make them more…