Bryan here.  The security community has been buzzing since SANS and MITRE’s joint announcement earlier this month of their list of the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. Now, I don’t want to get into a debate in this blog about whether this new list will become the new de facto standard for analyzing security vulnerabilities (or indeed, whether it already has become the new standard). Instead, I’d like to present an overview of how the Microsoft SDL maps to the CWE/SANS list, just like we did with the SDL/OWASP Top Ten mapping last May.

Michael and I have written up a detailed item-by-item analysis of the SDL coverage of the Top 25 and posted it on the microsoft.com Download Center. We believe that the results tend to endorse the validity of the SDL, given that the Top 25 were developed independently and the SDL does quite well at enabling us to root them out of the software we deliver. We encourage you to download the analysis white paper and make use of it in your own organization: we’ve published guidance around every manual process described in the paper, and we’ve also made many of the same SDL-required security tools that we use internally free for you to download and use as well.

Below is a summary of how the SDL maps to the Top 25 vulnerabilities; as you can see the SDL covers every one of the Top 25 vulnerabilities, and all but two of them (race conditions and download of code without integrity check) are covered by multiple SDL requirements. I’m also particularly pleased to note that we have tools to prevent or detect more than 75% of the Top 25.