Ontology-Based Support for Security Requirements Specification Process

The security requirements specification (SRS) is an integral aspect of the development of secured information systems and entails the formal documentation of the security needs of a system in a correct and consistent way. However, in many cases there is lack of sufficiently experienced security experts or security requirements (SR) engineer within an organization, which limits the quality of SR that are specified. This paper presents an approach that leverages ontologies and requirements boilerplates in order to alleviate the effect of lack of highly experienced personnel for SRS. It also offers a credible starting point for the SRS process. A preliminary evaluation of the tool prototype – ReqSec tool - was used to demonstrate the approach and to confirm its usability to support the SRS process. The tool helps to reduce the amount of effort required, stimulate discovery of latent security threats, and enables the specification of good quality SR

A CASE tool to support automated modelling and analysis of security requirements

Secure Tropos, an extension of the Tropos methodology, considers security requirements alongside functional requirements, from the early stages of the system development process. The Secure Tropos language uses security concepts such as security constraint, secure goal, secure plan, secure resource, and threat to capture the security concepts from both social and organisational settings. These concepts are used to model and reason about security for a specific system context. This paper presents a CASE tool, called SecTro, which supports automated modelling and analysis of security requirements based on Secure Tropos. The tool’s architecture, layout, and functionalities are demonstrated through a real world example using the Secure Tropos concepts

Software reliability and quality assurance challenges in cyber physical systems security

Software Reliability is the probability of failure-free software operation for a specified period of time in a specified environment. Cyber threats on software security have been prevailing and have increased exponentially, posing a major challenge on software reliability in the cyber physical systems (CPS) environment. Applying patches after the software has been developed is outdated and a major security flaw. However, this has posed a major software reliability challenge as threat actors are exploiting unpatched and insecure software configuration vulnerabilities that are not identified at the design phase. This paper aims to investigate the SDLC approach to software reliability and quality assurance challenges in CPS security. To demonstrate the applicability of our work, we review existing security requirements engineering concepts and methodologies such as TROPOS, I*, KAOS, Tropos and Secure Tropos to determine their relevance in software security. We consider how the methodologies and function points are used to implement constraints to improve software reliability. Finally, the function points concepts are implemented into the CPS security components. The results show that software security threats in CPS can be addressed by integrating the SRE approach and function point analysis in the development to improve software reliability