Formal derivation of security design specifications from security requirements

  • Authors:

  • Riham Hassan;Shawn Bohner;Sherif El-Kassas

  • Affiliations:

  • Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA;Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA;The American university in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th annual workshop on Cyber security and information intelligence research: developing strategies to meet the cyber security and information intelligence challenges ahead
  • Year:
  • 2008

  • Towards usable cyber security requirements

    Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research: Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies

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Abstract

Engineering secure software remains a significant challenge for today's software organizations as they struggle to understand the implications of security o the system and develop systems that guarantee specified software security properties. Despite many software engineering advances, current methods for deriving a design from a set of requirements that guarantee the retention of the intended security properties remains difficult and often unachievable. If security requirements are formalized and transformed into design using formal methods, the result would reduce the potential for security vulnerabilities through better clarity, completeness, and consistency. To this end, we outline a requirements-driven security engineering approach for deriving design specifications from security requirements that guarantee security properties specified in requirements are retained. We build on the goal-oriented KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) framework to formally construct a complete, consistent, and clear security requirements model. The resulting model is then transformed to the B language to derive security design specifications. Using B enables us to further implement the design while preserving requirements relevant security properties. Using the B refinement mechanism, we generate design specifications and ultimately implementation. The approach treats security-specific elements in a systematic and constructive way while considering security early in the development lifecycle with assurance of completeness, consistency and clarity throughout the development. Moreover, our approach allows for requirement traceability at the various phases of development that helps security evaluators to have more confidence in the target of evaluation.