An Ontology-Based Context Model for Managing Security Knowledge in Software Development

Software security has been the focus of the security community and practitioners over the past decades. Much security information is widely available in books, open literature or on the internet. We argue that the generated huge mass of information has resulted in a form of information overload to software engineers who usually finish reading it without being able to apply those principles clearly to their own application context. Our research tackles software security issues from a knowledge management perspective. In this paper, we present an ontology approach to model the knowledge of software security in a context- sensitive manner, supporting software engineers and learners to enable the correlation process between security domain knowledge and their working context. We also propose a web-based application for security knowledge sharing and learning where the ontology is adopted as the central knowledge repository

Modeling Security Risks at the System Design Stage Alignment of Mal Activity Diagrams and SecureUML to the ISSRM Domain Model

Turvatehnika disain on üks olulisi süsteemiarenduse komponente. Ta peaks läbima tervet süsteemiarendusprotsessi. Kahjuks pööratakse talle paljudel juhtudel tähelepanu ainult süsteemi arendamise ja haldamise ajal. Paljud turvalise modelleerimise keeled (näiteks Misuse Case, Secure Tropos) aitavad turvariskejuba nõuete analüüsi etapil hallata. Käesolevas magistritöös vaatleme modelleerimisvahendeid (pahateoskeemid ja SecureUML), mida kasutatakse süsteemi disainil. Täpsemalt, me uurime, kuivõrd need vahendid toetavad infosüsteemide turvariskide haldust (Information Systems Security Risks Management, ISSRM). Töö tulemuseks on tabel, mis seab pahateoskeemid ning SecureUML-keele konstruktsioonid ISSRM domeeni mõistetega omavahel vastavusse. Me põhjendame oma analüüsi ning valideerime saadud tulemusi mitmel illustratiivsel näitel. Me loodame, et saadud tulemused aitavad arendajatel paremini aru saada, kuidas turvariske süsteemi disainietapil arvesse võtta. Peale selle, nende keelte analüüs ühisel kontseptuaalsel taustal annab tulevikus võimaluse neid keeli korraga kasutada ning loodud mudeleid ühest keelest teise teisendada.Security engineering is one of the important concerns during system development. It should be addressed throughout the whole system development process; however in many cases it is often dealt only during system development and maintenance. There are several security modeling languages (e.g, Misuse case, Secure Tropos) that help dealing with security risk management at the requirements stage. In this thesis, we are focusing on the modeling languages (e.g. Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML) that are used to design the system. More specifically we investigate how these languages support information systems security risks management (ISSRM). The outcome of this work is an alignment table between the Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML language constructs to the ISSRM domain model concepts. We ground our analysis and validate the received results on the number of illustrative examples. We hope that our results will help developers to understand how they can consider security risks at the system design stage. In addition we open the way for the interoperability between different modeling languages that are analysed using the same conceptual background, thus, potentially leading to the transformation between these modeling approaches