Software properties and behaviors
Pascal Charles Meunier · Annual Information Security Symposium · 2008
Software has moved beyond the encoding of algorithms, to enforcing moral, ethical and legal values, implementing tactics, strategies and essentially the will of designers, coders and organizational (e.g., corporate) entities, or even laws. Buyers, users and communities incur risk due to the deployment of foreign or inappropriate behaviors. Due to code complexity, obfuscation and emergent behaviors, I posit that the systematic study of software behaviors is an important and sometimes the main source of reproducible and objective information on what an artifact (including infrastructure) will and will not do. I contribute definitions of some desirable software properties useful in the context of studying the risks posed by software behaviors: software transparency, purity, obedience and loyalty.