Software Security Knowledge Transferring and Learning with Concept Maps

Software security has been a subject of plethora studies for the past decades. A relatively large number of frameworks, coding standards and guidelines have been developed and published by security committees in publications or on the internet. We argue that the huge mass of information has resulted in a form of information overload to software developers who come from many disciplines and have different levels of programming knowledge. We consider that the knowledge contents of software security should be organized as scaffold learning by breaking down complex materials into component parts. In this paper, we present a concept map approach to model the knowledge of software security in a graphical and visualized format. The concept maps are constructed in accordance with the pre-developed software security domain model, which reduces the difficulties and complexity in developing concept maps. For operationalization, the proposed concept maps consider different learning preferences and form security metal models among developers.