We have all experienced the "thrill" of functional testing, going through requirements and then crafting test cases to ensure that the application behaves according to specifications. While this method has its place, it misses many classes of bugs, especially security bugs. For example, security bugs can manifest as extra functionality that may not violate requirements directly, but still expose catastrophic holes in software. Based on strategies that have successfully broken some of the world's most secure applications, Herbert Thompson presents the tools and techniques you need to find security problems before your application is released. Learn the security attacks and tools to uncover security vulnerabilities before hackers discover them for you.

For anyone involved in security testing, or for anyone who is just plain curious about this area of software testing, the following references will provide a good starting point for any effort that you might be asked to undertake. In this issue, Steven Splaine discusses this important aspect of software engineering.

While most bugs that make headline news are due to careless software implementations exploited by skilled hackers, the problems in KaZaA center around its user interface. This article details KaZaA's application flaws and then suggests ways to prevent such flaws.

Today component engineering is gaining substantial interest in the software engineering community. Jerry Gao provides insight and observations on component testability and proposes a new model to represent and measure the maturity levels of a component testing process. In this presentation, you will identify, classify, and discuss new issues in testing component-based software.