At my local university, there is a small student computing club of about 20 students.  The club has several small teams with specific areas of focus, such as mobile development, robotics, game development, and hacking / security.I am introducing some basic agile development concepts to a couple of the teams, such as user stories, estimating complexity of tasks, and continuous integration for version control and automated builds/testing.I am familiar with some basic development life-cycles, such as waterfall, spiral, RUP, agile, etc., but I am wondering if there is such a thing as a software development life-cycle for hacking / breaching security.  Surely, hackers are writing computer code, but what is the life-cycle of that code?  I don't think that they would be too concerned with maintenance, as once the breach has been found and patched, the code that exploited that breach is useless.I imagine the life-cycle would be something like:Find gap in securityExploit gap in securityProcure payloadUtilize payloadWhat kind of differences (if any) are there for the development life-cycle of software when the purpose of the product is to breach security?
What are unique aspects of a software Lifecycle of an attack/tool on a software vulnerability?
development process;security;hacking;sdlc
What type of code are you talking about?There are many security tools used in the process of hacking, including scanners like nmap, sqlmap, Nessus and many others. I would imagine they have the same type of software life-cycles like any other applications.On the other hand, there are exploit codes. Codes written to take advantage of a very specific exploit & situation. I very much doubt those need any life-cycle at all. However, many exploit codes are also integrated with a larger exploitation framework like Metasploit.After a discussion with @AviD, I would like to add in a few points.It will be very different for specific situations.Some exploit codes might be rushed out to take into account the window before the zero-day is patched. Code might be rushed out for other reasons as well. See: CRIME - How to beat the BEAST successor? for a great example of this. A person wrote a piece of PoC code to quickly prove his point. No software lifecycle methodology is taken into account for codes like this. Weaponized malware like stuxnet or FLAME probably do. Packaged software like Metasploit do.So the right answer is... it depends.