Software engineering for secure systems

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

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Requirements Engineering, 2010

2008

Security has become a primary and prevalent concern for software systems. The past decade has witnessed a tremendous increase in not only the sheer number of attacks but also the ease with which attacks can be performed on systems. We believe that in order to protect a system against harm (intended or not), attention must be given to its requirements. Similar to other system properties and quality attributes, security must be considered from inception, in other words starting with requirements. Security is a nonfunctional requirement (NFR) that is increasingly critical in its importance, unique in its requirements, yet must still be integrated with all other functional and non-functional requirements and mapped into successful architectures, designs, and implementation. Similar to other nonfunctional requirements, the unique nature and demands of security make it difficult and often ineffective to specify security concerns using "general purpose " requirements methods. As ...

Proceedings of the 6th WSEAS International …, 2007

Secure software development is one of the most information system issues that raised through the use of the internet and networked systems. The importance of developing secure software increases. In this work we present a process for the development of security critical software projects and an overview of some of the existing processes, standards, life cycle models that support the secure software development. It is a guide to the common body of knowledge for producing, acquiring, and sustaining secure software.

2007

There has been a growing interest in investigating methodologies to support the development of secure sys- tems in the software engineering research community. Re- cently, much attention has been focused on the modelling and analysis of security properties for systems at the soft- ware architecture design level. The potential benefits of this architecture level work are substantial: security flaws can be detected and removed earlier in the software de- velopment life-cycle. This reduces development time, re- duces development cost, and improves the quality of the resulting system. As a result of this attention, a wide variety of approaches have been proposed in the literature. At this point, a sur- vey for researchers involved in the problem of systemat- ically modelling and analyzing software architecture de- sign that have security properties would be of value to the community. This paper presents such a survey; it includes a discussion of semi-formal, formal, integrated semi-form...

2021

The importance of security in computer and information systems is increasing as network-connected computer systems become more ubiquitous. The objective of security is to verify that the computing platform is secured and that data and information are properly accessed and handled by users and applications, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity. To develop a framework for modeling and verifying security as a data quality attribute, designers need to identify parameters and variables with the expressive power to capture and represent security models and determine the type of analysis to enable. This report presents an approach for modeling and validating confidentiality based on the Bell–LaPadula security model using the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). The report describes the Bell–LaPadula security model and elaborates how security and Bell–LaPadula attributes are mapped to concepts and represented in AADL. It then describes modeling and validating security in...

The paper is aiming at a step towards a process model for the development of systems that are valid in the sense of meeting both specified security requirements and diverse user needs and expectations. The ultimate goal is to certify a system's validity. Derived from IT security evaluation criteria, the paper is outlining a certain integration of two independently developed process models in a way that validation and verification are becoming truly dovetailed. The discussed evaluation process model is currently being developed and implemented in the authors' IT security evaluation facility (ITSEF). It is one of the tar- gets of this publication to bring academic research and development on validation and verification closer to the IT security evaluation practice.

2005

Security requirements, such as authentication, confidentiality, authorization, availability, integrity and privacy, are becoming extremely common in software development processes. However, in practical terms, it has been proved that only rarely the developed software fulfils the related security requirements. The reason for this is twofold. On one hand software developers are not security experts and thus they are not competent in selecting and applying the appropriate security countermeasures. On the other hand, many security requirements are intrinsically difficult to deal with. This paper aims to address both of the aforementioned issues and to introduce potential solutions. It starts by analysing the major security requirements, and goes on to explore how they can be mapped into concrete security solutions or/and mechanisms. Then, it examines how the fulfilment of security requirements influences the choice of development methodologies and paradigms (with the emphasis being on the design phase), so that the requirements are effectively satisfied. The discussion covers object-oriented and aspect-oriented programming, the Rational Unified Process, UML and UMLsec, as well as security patterns, with regard to the ways they can support the use of security solutions or/and mechanisms.

Proceedings of the 2006 …, 2006

This paper presents a framework for security requirements elicitation and analysis, based upon the construction of a context for the system and satisfaction arguments for the security of the system. One starts with enumeration of security goals based on assets in the system. These goals are used to derive security requirements in the form of constraints. The system context is described using a problem-centered notation, then this context is validated against the security requirements through construction of a satisfaction argument. The satisfaction argument is in two parts: a formal argument that the system can meet its security requirements, and a structured informal argument supporting the assumptions expressed in the formal argument. The construction of the satisfaction argument may fail, revealing either that the security requirement cannot be satisfied in the context, or that the context does not contain sufficient information to develop the argument. In this case, designers and architects are asked to provide additional design information to resolve the problems.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2013

Information Systems Security is one of the most critical challenges presently facing nearly every one of the organizations. However, making certain security and quality in both information and the systems which control information is a difficult goal necessitating the mixture of two wide research disciplines which are typically separate: security engineering and secure software engineering. Security engineering has an extensive history, and has focused generally on providing advances in security models, techniques and protocols, but it remains in a steady state of the development. Secure software engineering, however, has emerged relatively recently, but is growing quickly and is paying attention on the integration of security into software engineering techniques; models and processes, in order to build up more secure information systems. In the study of security engineering, security described as the protection from harm.It presented the principles of security, the number of security mechanisms and the risk analysis to identify the risk. In the study of secure software engineering, it has been identified a number of challenges that need to establish for developing the secure software system. We also investigated a number of methods and languages that is modeling the security into software systems.