A tool for modeling software security requirements using security patterns
Security requirements of today’s software systems are increasing and becoming complex. Software industry has well recognized that security should be incorporated at earlier stages of the software development. It is not easy for the programmers and developers to incorporate security in the softwar...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/69407/1/FSKTM%202016%2049%20-%20IR.pdf |
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| Summary: | Security requirements of today’s software systems are increasing and becoming
complex. Software industry has well recognized that security should be incorporated
at earlier stages of the software development. It is not easy for the programmers and
developers to incorporate security in the software without proper expertise in it. For
that reason different security patterns were proposed by the security experts for
implementation of security by non-security experts. A security pattern provides well
proven solution for the existing security problem in a specific context provided by the
security experts. Security patterns usually are in textual format due to which they are
often neglected at the design level. Security patterns do not constitute an intuitive
solution that can be used by software designers because they are not useful without a
systematic way to apply them. Security patterns lack comprehensive structure that
conveys essential information inherent to security engineering (SE). This research
presentsmethodology for presenting secure software requirements using Security
Patterns that is tailored to meetthe needs of secure system development. In order to
maximize comprehensibility, well-known notations of Unified Modeling Language
(UML) is used to represent structuraland behavioral aspects of design. Only 13% of
the papers published till 2015 involve tooling support for security patterns. To
encounter this limitation, a methodology which focuses on the providing solution
provided by the security pattern in the form of standard UML notations. As the
proposed method results in an extension of Deployment diagram, it is named as
Security Patterns Deployment Diagram (SPDD). It represents the solution provided
by security patterns in standard UML graphical notation, which includes the
compulsory elements of security patterns that are context, problem, actors, relations
and solution including where attacks will be fended off in the early design stage of the
software system in a single view. SPDD is proposed along with security modeling tool
called SPDD Editor for modeling security pattern solution using proposed
methodology. Security patterns research uses UML for modeling regardless of
security patterns to be dealt with. It could be because UML is the most widely accepted
formalism for the analysis and design of software. Therefore, itis considered as
security pattern modeling method. This extension of deployment diagram provides a suitable way to define semantics for each solution provided by security pattern and
allowing developers to easily understand software security requirements and their
implementations in detail. A Plug-in for SeaMonster security designing tool has been
developed to support the designing of the proposed diagram using Eclipse Graphical
Modeling Framework (GMF) and Eclipse Graphical Editor Framework (GEF). The
validation of SPDD has been done with the Hospital Information System (HIS) and
E-Commerce System case studies.
An expert review was performed to verify the proposed methodology and proposed
tool support. SPDD editor tool and both methods SPDD and Component based
application (CBA) were also evaluated by three experts in the field. The expert review
results showed positive results towards acceptance of SPDD method and tool.
Experimental comparison with twenty participants was also performed to validate the
effectiveness and to find out the better method in terms of designing solution provided
by security patterns from the participant’s point of view. The CBA method was
selected to compare with proposed SPDD method because of the fact that most of the
programmers and developers usually known to component diagram and there is no
need to teach them its application and they can easily perform the tasks related to CBA
method and also security pattern modeling application using CBA is previously
proposed in literature. The experimental results from participants showed that there
is a significant difference in designing threats and mitigation using SPDD editor in
two methods. The SPDD method is used to design more threats and mitigation as
compared to CBA method. By using proposed methodology and SPDD editor tool it
is easier for the non-security expert to incorporate security at earlier stages of software
development. It provides the facility of designing the security requirements in the
architecture at design stage with incorporating expert knowledge of the security
experts provided by the security patterns. |
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