Conceptual Framework for Understanding Security Requirements: A Preliminary Study on Stuxnet

Abstract

As we analyze the latest occurring Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), we understand that attackers tend to conduct their methods by various means and ways, and are not limited to just a single pattern. Even though threats are represented by using a variety of modeling techniques, very little research has been done to learn about the security requirements needed from the understanding of commonly rooted causes of these threats. We propose a layered conceptual framework to better understand the problem from specific instances to generalized abstractions, so that it can eventually provide a good set of security requirements. In this framework, we propose building the ontology based on the Goal-based Model and Activity Diagram, and showing how to understand the context of the problem domain with extended relationships between concepts. We expect that our work can provide a foundation of good insight of the problem domain of security requirements and that we elicit security requirements through this work based on a preliminary case study on Stuxnet.