A Formal Methods Approach to Security Requirements Specification and Verification

Abstract

The specification and the verification of security requirements is one of the major computer-based systems challenges. Security requirements need to be precisely specified before a tool can manipulate them, and though several approaches to security requirements specification have been proposed, they do not provide the scalability and flexibility required in practice. We take this problem towards an integrated approach for security requirement specification and treatment during the software architecture design time. The general idea of the approach is to: (1) specify security requirements as properties of a modeled system in a technology-independent specification language; (2) implement the developed model in a suitable language with tool support for requirement satisfaction through model verification; and (3) suggest a set of security policies to constrain the operation of the system and to guarantee the security properties. In the scope of this paper, we use first-order logic as a formalism that is abstract and technology-independent and Alloy as a tooled language used in modeling and software development. To validate our work, we explore a set of representative security properties from categories based on CIA classification in the context of secure component-based software architecture development.