SecAppDev 2012 will be held from March 5th to 9th 2012 in Leuven, Belgium, at the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, based in the historic Irish College.
SecAppDev is a series of courses on Secure Application Development, run by secappdev.org, a non-profit organization that aims to broaden security awareness in the development community and advance secure software engineering practices. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management are founding partners.
When we ran our first annual course in 2005, emphasis was on awareness and security basics, but as the field matured and a thriving security training market developed, we felt it was not appropriate to compete as a non-profit organization. Our focus has hence shifted to providing a platform for leading-edge and experimental material from thought leaders in academia and industry. We look toward academics to provide research results that are ready to break into the mainstream and attract people with an industrial background to try out new content and formats.
We do not target security experts nor developers of security products, but rather developers whose main focus not being security, nonetheless need to be sufficiently security-savvy to deliver reliable applications. We are trying to plug the security blind spot of academic software engineering courses.
We cover a wide range of facets of secure software engineering including
- threat modeling
- architecture
- design
- coding
- testing
- cryptography
- web applications
- mobile applications
- economic/business aspects
We believe that learning requires active engagement with the topic. We therefore promote interactivity, both in the classroom as well as outside - the course is run in very pleasant surroundings, a 17th century Franciscan centre of learning, and we have a well-attended social program. We limit the number of seats available on the course to 50.
Experiential learning sessions, including hands-on sessions and simulations, have been a much appreciated addition of the last couple of years.
