Using Security Attack Scenarios to Analyse Security During Information Systems Design

It has been widely argued in the literature that security concerns should be integrated with software engineering practices. However, only recently work has been initiated towards this direction. Most of this work, however, only considers how security can be analysed during the development lifecycles and not how the security of an information system can be tested during the analysis and design stages. In this paper we present results from the development of a technique, which is based on the use of scenarios, to test the reaction of an information system against potential security attacks

Security Attack Testing (SAT)—testing the security of information systems at design time

For the last few years a considerable number of efforts have been devoted into integrating security issues into information systems development practices. This has led to a number of languages, methods, methodologies and techniques for considering security issues during the developmental stages of an information system. However, these approaches mainly focus on security requirements elicitation, analysis and design issues and neglect testing. This paper presents the Security Attack Testing (SAT) approach, a novel scenario-based approach that tests the security of an information system at the design time. The approach is illustrated with the aid of a real-life case study involving the development of a health and social care information system

A security oriented approach in the development of multiagent systems : applied to the management of the health and social care needs of older people in England.

Security can play an important role in the development of some multi agent systems. However, a careful analysis of software development processes indicates that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. This approach, usually, leads to problems, such as conflicts between security and functional requirements, which can translate into security vulnerabilities. As a result, the integration of security issues in agent oriented software engineering methodologies has been identified as an important issue. Nevertheless, developers of agent oriented software engineering methodologies have mainly neglected security engineering and in fact very little evidence has been reported on work that integrates security issues into the development stages of agent oriented software engineering methodologies. This thesis advances the current state of the art In agent oriented software engineering in many ways. It identifies problems associated with the integration of security and software engineering and proposes a set of minimum requirements that a security oriented process should demonstrate. It extends the concepts and the development process of the Tropos methodology with respect to security to allow developers, even those with minimum security knowledge, to identify desired security requirements for their multi agent systems, reason about them, and as a result develop a system that satisfies its security requirements. In doing so, this research has developed (1) an analysis technique to enable developers to select amongst alternative architectural styles using as criteria the security requirements of the system, (2) a pattern language consisting of security patterns for multi agent systems, and (3) a scenario-based technique that allows developers to test the reaction of the system to potential attacks. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by employing it in the development of the electronic single assessment process (eSAP) system, a real-life case study that provided the initial motivation for this research

Visual Scenarios for Validation of Requirements Specification

The development of a large information system is generally regarded as one of the most complex activities undertaken by organisations and it is dependent on the communication and understanding among the actors of the system (i.e. managers, users, developers, etc.). Users are predicted to use requirements and purpose as most natural descriptors of domains, while analysts use more formal representations. The Validation phase of Requirements Engineering, involves checking the formal description of the universe of discourse, against the non formal description of the user's needs and domain knowledge. Once a requirements specification has been produced, most organisations require formal reviews, in which the behaviour of the future system is communicated between the users and the analyst. This paper advocates that many benefits can be accrued from the use of visual scenarios for the purpose of validating conceptual specifications during Requirements Engineering. To this end, the paper descr..