Difference between revisions of "OWASP Press"

The OWASP Press Project

The OWASP press project is proposal that allows community authoring with just in time publishing.

Community authoring is fraught with challenges. Word documents with revisions on eventually crash, and so people eventually take to naming conventions to manage the versions. Additionally, there is only one canonical master; this makes authoring and editing in parallel impossible; and merging the resulting versions is an enormous time sink in and of itself. This only gets worse the larger the book is and the more authors that are involved.

Additionally, I have long desired a bookshelf full of OWASP books; and indeed other people have as well. As we have an OWASP Lulu store. The problem with this model however is that the publishing is remains oriented around the 'dead-tree publishing' workflow. Where books are written to a deadline and 'released' to the editors, and finally sent to the printers for publishing and distribution. And by the time the documents make it to publication they are already out of date.

Description

OWASP has long provided some of the very best documentation on the web for Application Security. Among the awesome documentation resources are projects like OWASP Cheatsheets, The OWASP Development Guide, OWASP Testing Guide, OWASP AppSensor and OWASP SAMM.

These community documentation projects are living, collaborative works and so they present a special challenge to the 'dead-tree publishing' workflow. Additionally, I have the books I love most on my Kindle not a physical bookshelf, who wants to lug a dead-tree when you can haul around a library?

The answer was obviously just-in-time publishing, after all isn't this what a wiki is? Where anybody from the OWASP community could update a text and the update be instantly available? While wiki technology really excels at on-line living documentation and knowledge management; wiki's have failed to succeed at general purpose publishing platforms.

I have spent the last month exploring ways to instantiate a just-in-time open publishing workflow to produce digital and dead-tree editions of the OWASP documentation projects.

Every avenue I turned down, I would inevitably run into numerous issues attempting to create a workflow. While, I was able to get some ideas to work successfully, I was unsatisfied, as the complexity required would have created a participation barrier to entry.

Fortunately, I was not alone in my thinking and I discovered last week that the people at Leanpub had solved exactly these issues that needed to be overcome to make this a reality.

Licensing

A project must be licensed under a community friendly or open source license.  For more information on OWASP recommended licenses, please see OWASP Licenses. While OWASP does not promote any particular license over another, the vast majority of projects have chosen a Creative Commons license variant for documentation projects, or a GNU General Public License variant for tools and code projects.

The OWASP Security Principles are free to use. In fact it is encouraged!!! Additionally, I also encourage you to contribute back to the project. I have no monopoly on this knowledge; however, we all have pieces of this knowledge from our experience. Let's begin by putting our individual pieces together to make something great. Great things happen when people work together.

The OWASP Security Principles are licensed under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license], so you can copy, distribute and transmit the work, and you can adapt it, and use it commercially, but all provided that you attribute the work and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

What is OWASP Security Principles Project?

Here you should add a short description of what your project actually does. What is the primary goal of your project, and why is it important?

The end goal is to identify, cite, and document the fundamental principles of information security. Once this is well organised, I think it would be great to publish this through the OWASP Press. Of course, it will always remain freely available, and any money collected will go directly into the project to absorb costs with any remaining funds going to the OWASP Foundation.

This document should serve as a guide to technical architects and designers outlining the fundamental principles of security.

Presentation

This is where you can link to slide presentations related to your project.

AppSec USA 2013 [1]

Project Leader

A project leader is the individual who decides to lead the project throughout its lifecycle. The project leader is responsible for communicating the project’s progress to the OWASP Foundation, and he/she is ultimately responsible for the project’s deliverables. The project leader must provide OWASP with his/her real name and contact e-mail address for his/her project application to be accepted, as OWASP prides itself on the openness of its products, operations, and members.

• Dennis Groves

Related Projects

This is where you can link to other OWASP Projects that are similar to yours.

• OWASP_CISO_Survey

Quick Download

This is where you can link to your repository.

The home of the OWASP Security Principles is on GitHub. You are encourged to fork, edit and push your changes back to the project through git or edit the project directly on github.

However, if you like you may also download the master repository from the following links:

• .zip file.
• .tgz file.

News and Events

This is where you can link to press your project has been a part of. Appropriate press includes: Project Leader interviews, articles written about your project, and videos about your project.

• [20 Nov 2013] News 2
• [30 Sep 2013] News 1

In Print

This is where you place links to where your project product can be downloaded or purchased, in the case of a book.

This project can be purchased as a print on demand book from Lulu.com

Classifications