Supporting requirements engineers in recognising security issues

  • Authors:
  • Eric Knauss;Siv Houmb;Kurt Schneider;Shareeful Islam;Jan Jürjens

  • Affiliations:
  • Software Engineering Group, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany;SecureNOK Ltd., Norway;Software Engineering Group, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany;School of Computing, IT and Engineering, University of East London, UK;Software Engineering, Technische Universität Dortmund and Fraunhofer ISST, Germany

  • Venue:
  • REFSQ'11 Proceedings of the 17th international working conference on Requirements engineering: foundation for software quality
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Context & motivation: More and more software projects today are security-related in one way or the other. Many environments are initially not considered security-related and no security experts are assigned. Requirements engineers often fail to recognise indicators for security problems. Question/problem: Ignoring security issues early in a project is a major source of recurring security problems in practice. Identifying security-relevant requirements is labourintensive and error-prone. Security may be neglected in order to finish on time and in budget. Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a tool-supported method that provides assistance for requirements engineering, with an emphasis on security requirements. We investigate whether security-relevant requirements can be automatically identified using a Bayesian classifier. Our results indicate that this is feasible, in particular if the classifier is trained with domain specific data and documents from previous projects. Contribution: We show how the ability to identify security-relevant requirements can be integrated in a workflow of requirements analysis and reuse of experience. In practice, this can increase security awareness within the software development process. We discuss limitations and potential of this approach.