Comparing attack trees and misuse cases in an industrial setting

Abstract

The last decade has seen an increasing focus on addressing security already during the earliest stages of system development, such as requirements determination. Attack trees and misuse cases are established techniques for representing security threats along with their potential mitigations. Previous work has compared attack trees and misuse cases in two experiments with students. The present paper instead presents an experiment where industrial practitioners perform the experimental tasks in their workplace. The industrial experiment confirms a central finding from the student experiments: that attack trees tend to help identifying more threats than misuse cases. It also presents a new result: that misuse cases tend to encourage identification of threats associated with earlier development stages than attack trees. The two techniques should therefore be considered complementary and should be used together in practical requirements work.