Modeling Requirements for Security-enhanced Design of Embedded Systems

Abstract

Designing an embedded system is a complex process that involves working on both hardware and software. The first step in the design process is defining functional and non-functional requirements; among them, it is fundamental to also consider security. We propose an effective way for designers to specify security requirements starting from User Security Requirements. User Security Requirements are high-level requirements related to security attacks that the system should be able to withstand. We also provide a mechanism to automatically translate these User Requirements into System Security Requirements, that include a detailed description of security solutions. For expressing requirements we use Unified Modeling Language (UML); specifically, we create a UML profile to describe user requirements and we use model-to-model transformation to automatically generate system requirements. We show the effectiveness of the modeling scheme and of the translation mechanism by applying our methodology to a case study based on wearable devices for e-health monitoring.