Software Architectural Quality Assessment Model for Security Analysis Using Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) Method

Abstract

In the last decade, the greater need for quality software led to the development of quality assessment especially at the software architecture (SA) level. Since software security is an important quality attribute, several models have been evolved to validate the security related issues at the SA level. This paper proposes a Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) with Buckley method for security assessment at the SA level for object-oriented design. FAHP is a Multi-Criteria Decision Making approach which employs linguistic variables as a pair-wise comparison matrix to derive priorities of various selection attributes and sub-attributes. In addition, the proposed work uses genetic algorithm to fill the missing values in the comparison matrix of FAHP. The validation of FAHP model takes place by the use of four versions of apache Tomcat series namely TC 7.0.6, TC 7.0.22, TC 7.0.39 and TC 7.0.47. The obtained results ensure that the proposed FAHP model with Buckley method performs well than existing methods in terms of security index to measure the performance at the SA level and defect density ratio to validate the results.