Moving from Requirements to Design Confronting Security Issues: A Case Study

  • Authors:

  • Spyros T. Halkidis;Alexander Chatzigeorgiou;George Stephanides

  • Affiliations:

  • Computational Systems and Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece 54006;Computational Systems and Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece 54006;Computational Systems and Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece 54006

  • Venue:
  • OTM '09 Proceedings of the Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, IS, and ODBASE 2009 on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: Part II
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Since the emergence of software security as a research area, it has been evident that security should be incorporated as early as possible in the software lifecycle. The advantage is that large gains can be achieved in terms of cost and effort compared to the introduction of security as an afterthought. The earliest possible phase to consider possible attacks is during requirements specification. A widely accepted approach to consider security in the requirements is the employment of misuse cases. In this paper we examine a case study to automatically generate a class diagram, based on the use and misuse cases present in the requirements. Particularly, we extend a natural language processing approach to move beyond a general domain model and produce a detailed class diagram. Moreover, security patterns are introduced in appropriate places of the design to confront the documented attacks and protect the threatened resources. Additionally, we perform an experimental study to investigate the tradeoff between the additional effort to mitigate the attacks and the security risk of the resulting system. Finally, the optimization problem of finding the smallest system regarding additional effort given a maximum acceptable risk is established and an appropriate algorithm to solve it is proposed.