Aspect-oriented reuse mechanism for security targets and protection profiles

Abstract

Common Criteria (CC) is an international standard for evaluation and certification of IT products. Although a security target (ST) is an important and central document used in the security evaluation process of CC, creating STs is not so easy task for most of software engineers. On the other hand, there are dependency relations among several elements of an ST and a protection profile (PP). Elements of an ST/PP are elements of mandatory contents of STs/PPs defined in CC part 1, e.g., security problems, security objectives, security requirements, and so on. If there is a same element in both an ST/PP and other ST/PP, then what to describe and how to describe elements that depend on the same element are probably similar. Such same element and its dependent elements are a cross-cutting concern among the STs/PPs. Although retrieving cross-cutting concerns among certified STs and PPs are useful for creation and evaluation of STs and PPs, it is difficult, not impossible, to do that because certified STs and PPs are published as PDF files. This paper presents an aspect-oriented reuse mechanism for STs and PPs to help creation and evaluation of STs. The paper also shows technical issues and current implementation of the mechanism.