Foundations for Designing Secure Architectures

AbstractDeveloping security-critical systems is difficult and there are many well-known examples of security weaknesses exploited in practice. In particular, so far little research has been performed on the soundly based design of secure architectures, which would be urgently needed to develop secure systems reliably and efficiently. In this abstract, we sketch some research on a sound methodology supporting secure architecture design. We give an overview over an extension of UML, called UMLsec, that allows expressing security-relevant information within the diagrams in an architectural design specification. We define foundations for secure architectural design patterns. We present tool-support which has been developed for the UMLsec secure architecture approach

Evolution of security engineering artifacts: a state of the art survey

Security is an important quality aspect of modern open software systems. However, it is challenging to keep such systems secure because of evolution. Security evolution can only be managed adequately if it is considered for all artifacts throughout the software development lifecycle. This article provides state of the art on the evolution of security engineering artifacts. The article covers the state of the art on evolution of security requirements, security architectures, secure code, security tests, security models, and security risks as well as security monitoring. For each of these artifacts the authors give an overview of evolution and security aspects and discuss the state of the art on its security evolution in detail. Based on this comprehensive survey, they summarize key issues and discuss directions of future research

Modelling Security of Critical Infrastructures: A Survivability Assessment

Critical infrastructures, usually designed to handle disruptions caused by human errors or random acts of nature, define assets whose normal operation must be guaranteed to maintain its essential services for human daily living. Malicious intended attacks to these targets need to be considered during system design. To face these situations, defence plans must be developed in advance. In this paper, we present a Unified Modelling Language profile, named SecAM, that enables the modelling and security specification for critical infrastructures during the early phases (requirements, design) of system development life cycle. SecAM enables security assessment, through survivability analysis, of different security solutions before system deployment. As a case study, we evaluate the survivability of the Saudi Arabia crude-oil network under two different attack scenarios. The stochastic analysis, carried out with Generalized Stochastic Petri nets, quantitatively estimates the minimization of attack damages on the crude-oil network

Modelling Security Requirements Through Extending Scrum Agile Development Framework

Security is today considered as a basic foundation in software development and therefore, the modelling and implementation of security requirements is an essential part of the production of secure software systems. Information technology organisations are moving towards agile development methods in order to satisfy customers' changing requirements in light of accelerated evolution and time restrictions with their competitors in software production. Security engineering is considered difficult in these incremental and iterative methods due to the frequency of change, integration and refactoring. The objective of this work is to identify and implement practices to extend and improve agile methods to better address challenges presented by security requirements consideration and management. A major practices is security requirements capture mechanisms such as UMLsec for agile development processes. This thesis proposes an extension to the popular Scrum framework by adopting UMLsec security requirements modelling techniques with the introduction of a Security Owner role in the Scrum framework to facilitate such modelling and security requirements considerations generally. The methodology involved experimentation of the inclusion of UMLsec and the Security Owner role to determine their impact on security considerations in the software development process. The results showed that overall security requirements consideration improved and that there was a need for an additional role that has the skills and knowledge to facilitate and realise the benefits of the addition of UMLsec

Engineering secure systems: Models, patterns and empirical validation

Several development approaches have been proposed to handle the growing complexity of software system design. The most popular methods use models as the main artifacts to construct and maintain. The desired role of such models is to facilitate, systematize and standardize the construction of software-based systems. In our work, we propose a model-driven engineering (MDE) methodological approach associated with a pattern-based approach to support the development of secure software systems. We address the idea of using patterns to describe solutions for security as recurring security problems in specific design contexts and present a well-proven generic scheme for their solutions. The proposed approach is based on metamodeling and model transformation techniques to define patterns at different levels of abstraction and generate different representations according to the target domain concerns, respectively. Moreover, we describe an operational architecture for development tools to support the approach. Finally, an empirical evaluation of the proposed approach is presented through a practical application to a use case in the metrology domain with strong security requirements, which is followed by a description of a survey performed among domain experts to better understand their perceptions regarding our approach

Engineering security into distributed systems: a survey of methodologies

Rapid technological advances in recent years have precipitated a general shift towards software distribution as a central computing paradigm. This has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the dangers of security breaches, often causing security attributes to become an inhibiting factor for use and adoption. Despite the acknowledged importance of security, especially in the context of open and collaborative environments, there is a growing gap in the survey literature relating to systematic approaches (methodologies) for engineering secure distributed systems. In this paper, we attempt to fill the aforementioned gap by surveying and critically analyzing the state-of-the-art in security methodologies based on some form of abstract modeling (i.e. model-based methodologies) for, or applicable to, distributed systems. Our detailed reviews can be seen as a step towards increasing awareness and appreciation of a range of methodologies, allowing researchers and industry stakeholders to gain a comprehensive view of the field and make informed decisions. Following the comprehensive survey we propose a number of criteria reflecting the characteristics security methodologies should possess to be adopted in real-life industry scenarios, and evaluate each methodology accordingly. Our results highlight a number of areas for improvement, help to qualify adoption risks, and indicate future research directions.Anton V. Uzunov, Eduardo B. Fernandez, Katrina Falkne

Balancing Risk Appetite and Risk Attitude in Requirements: a Framework for User Liberation

The tendency to throw controls at perceived and real system vulnerabilities, coupled with the likelihood of these controls being technical in nature, has the propensity to favour security over usability. However there is little evidence of increased assurance and it could encourage work stoppages or deviations that keep honest users from engaging with the system. The conflicting balance of trust and controls, and the challenge of turning that balance into clear requirements, creates an environment that alienates users and feeds the paranoia of actors who assume more ownership of the system than necessary. Security therefore becomes an inhibitor rather than an enabler for the community. This paper looks at measuring the balance of an organisation’s or a community’s risk appetite with the risk attitudes of its members in the early stages of IS development. It suggests how the dials of assurance can be influenced by the levers of good systems practice to create a cultural shift to trusting the users

Measuring software security from the design of software

The vast majority of our contemporary society owns a mobile phone, which has resulted in a dramatic rise in the amount of networked computers in recent years. Security issues in the computers have followed the same trend and nearly everyone is now affected by such issues. How could the situation be improved? For software engineers, an obvious answer is to build computer software with security in mind. A problem with building software with security is how to define secure software or how to measure security. This thesis divides the problem into three research questions. First, how can we measure the security of software? Second, what types of tools are available for measuring security? And finally, what do these tools reveal about the security of software? Measuring tools of these kind are commonly called metrics. This thesis is focused on the perspective of software engineers in the software design phase. Focus on the design phase means that code level semantics or programming language specifics are not discussed in this work. Organizational policy, management issues or software development process are also out of the scope. The first two research problems were studied using a literature review while the third was studied using a case study research. The target of the case study was a Java based email server called Apache James, which had details from its changelog and security issues available and the source code was accessible. The research revealed that there is a consensus in the terminology on software security. Security verification activities are commonly divided into evaluation and assurance. The focus of this work was in assurance, which means to verify one’s own work. There are 34 metrics available for security measurements, of which five are evaluation metrics and 29 are assurance metrics. We found, however, that the general quality of these metrics was not good. Only three metrics in the design category passed the inspection criteria and could be used in the case study. The metrics claim to give quantitative information on the security of the software, but in practice they were limited to evaluating different versions of the same software. Apart from being relative, the metrics were unable to detect security issues or point out problems in the design. Furthermore, interpreting the metrics’ results was difficult. In conclusion, the general state of the software security metrics leaves a lot to be desired. The metrics studied had both theoretical and practical issues, and are not suitable for daily engineering workflows. The metrics studied provided a basis for further research, since they pointed out areas where the security metrics were necessary to improve whether verification of security from the design was desired.Siirretty Doriast

The Security Twin Peaks

The feedback from architectural decisions to the elaboration of requirements is an established concept in the software engineering community. However, pinpointing the nature of this feedback in a precise way is a largely open problem. Often, the feedback is generically characterized as additional qualities that might be affected by an architect’s choice. This paper provides a practical perspective on this problem by leveraging architectural security patterns. The contribution of this paper is the Security Twin Peaks model, which serves as an operational framework to co-develop security in the requirements and the architectural artifacts