Guide
Secure by Design: what CISA's principles mean for software buyers
Secure by Design is CISA's push — co-authored with the NSA, FBI, and international partners — for software manufacturers to ship products that are secure out of the box. It's aimed at vendors. But buyers can weaponize it in procurement.
The three principles, in buyer language
- Take ownership of customer security outcomes. Ask vendors: what percentage of your customers run with default-secure configurations? Who's responsible when they don't?
- Embrace radical transparency. Ask for a vulnerability disclosure program, published CVEs, and honest incident communication history.
- Build for resilience. Ask how the product degrades under attack and what the vendor's own supply-chain attestations look like.
Putting it in RFPs
Add two lines to your next software RFP: “Describe your alignment with CISA's Secure by Design principles” and “Provide your vulnerability disclosure policy URL.” Vendors that answer crisply are signaling maturity; vendors that dodge are telling you something too.
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