Fortify Gives Away 360 Software to Universities

By Alan Harten

Fortify Software is turning to old fashioned philanthropic gestures.

One hundred years ago the wealthy factory owner would have built an orphanage or added a new library to a university.

The modern version of that is to offer educational establishments your valuable software program.

Fortify has been doing just that, offering educational establishments around the world their 360 software, which includes its award-winning source code analysis, program trace analysis, and real-time analysis.

So far over fifty universities have accepted the offer, including the prestigious educational names of Harvard, Stanford, University of California, Davis, Princeton and Purdue.

These and other universities will use the software in research programs as well as regular course work.

The company believes that graduates who have been trained in the use of this type of secure code and are also familiar with writing similar code, will be in high demand for work with IT companies.

Several of the 50+ institutions have already implemented the 360 into their curricula and research projects.

The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue has already utilised it in numerous classes and laboratories.

Many establishments are in the process of building software engineering classes based on the Fortify 360, including Northern Kentucky University and the Polytechnic Institute and NYU.

The company hopes that using the software will increase student’s awareness of security and the role it plays in modern computing.

Matt Bishop, a professor of computer science at UC Davis said: “Never before has the practice of secure software development been so important, which is why software engineers should be required to learn the practice of secure development from the start.”

Experts at the University of Wisconsin are spearheading a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to research vulnerability assessment techniques focusing on grid middleware software – a software run on many of the largest clusters or grids in the world.