Functionally Interpreting Security

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe outcomes of an exploration of what security means as an engineered function are presented, based upon principles of secure system design. The exploration was done to support an effort to formalize the syntax and semantics for the expression of security protection needs in system requirements, and to enable alignments with system safety and resilience requirements. The exploration produced a clearer interpretation of the essential aspects of security as postulated by foundational work on secure system design and was cross checked against representative classes of security requirement criteria to confirm accuracy and sufficiency of coverage of key security requirement types. The resultant perspective of what it means to be secure can be useful to inform the development of effective practices for the design of secure systems that are aligned with Future of Systems Engineering (FuSE) concepts, particularly security as a functional requirement. Further, the perspective helps to distinguish those characteristics of security (loss of “anything”) that are in common, and that contrast, with safety (loss of “specific things”) and resilience (loss of “capability”).