Model-based Security Engineering Research Articles

Using Model-Based Security Engineering in the Development of Complex Aircraft Cabin Systems

Using Model-Based Security Engineering in the Development of Complex Aircraft Cabin Systems

WorSE: A Workbench for Model-based Security Engineering

IT systems with sophisticated security requirements increasingly apply problem-specific security policies for specifying, analyzing, and implementing security properties. Due to their key role for defining and enforcing strategic security concepts, security polices are extremely critical, and quality assets such as policy correctness or policy consistency are essential objectives in policy engineering.This paper argues for a tool-supported policy engineering approach to increase the efficiency and quality of security policy making. The paper's general topic is WorSE, a policy engineering workbench encompassing the automation of engineering steps, pre-built model patterns, integrated plausibility checks, and model analysis tools; the paper especially focuses on tools supporting model engineering and model analysis, and describes their theoretical foundations and practical application.

Model-based Security Engineering of SOA Systems Using Modified "UML-SOA-Sec"

In SOA environment, software systems are composed of services which are scattered across enterprises and architectures. Security play vital role during the design, development and operation of SOA application. However, analysis of today’s software development approaches reveals that the engineering of security into the system design is often neglected. Currently security is incorporated in SOA applications in an ad-hoc manner and integrated during the applications development phase or administration phase or it is out sourced. In practice security is not defined during the early phases of software development and left onto developers. Properly configuring security requirements in SOA applications is quite difficult for developers because they are not security experts; furthermore, SOA security is cross-domain and all required information is not available at downstream phases. This reveals the importance of adding security objectives in early development phases i.e. at design phase by the business process expert. However, a business process expert is unable to specify security objectives due to lake of security modelling elements in a general purpose modelling languages. As a result, he/she either ignores the security objectives in a business process model or indicates them in textual way. The post-hoc, low-level integration of security has a negative impact on resulting SOA applications. A Domain Specific Language named “UML-SOA-Sec” is proposed for the Model driven development of secure SOA systems based on the UML. Aim is to facilitate the business process expert in modelling the security requirements along the business process modelling. This security annotated business process model will facilitate the security expert in specifying the concrete security implementation. As a proof of work; proposed “UML-SOA-Sec” is applied to modelling of a typical business process of healthcare system.

From goal-driven security requirements engineering to secure design

Security of intelligent software systems is an important area of research. Although security is traditionally considered a technical issue; security is, in fact, a two-dimensional problem, which involves technical as well as social challenges. Goal-driven requirements engineering (GDRE) has been proposed in the literature as a suitable paradigm for the analysis of security issues and elicitation of security requirements at both the social and technical level. Nevertheless, there is lack of approaches, which would support the successful transformation of the elicited, using GDRE approaches, security requirements to design. This paper presents work that fills this gap. The presented approach, which is based on the integration of a goal-driven security requirements engineering (GDSRE) methodology and a model-based security engineering (MBSE) method, has some important features: (1) It provides a structured process to translate the results of the GDSRE method to a design, which satisfies these requirements; (2) it allows the simultaneous elicitation and analysis of the security requirements and the functional requirements of the system; (3) it allows consideration of both the social and the technical dimensions of the system's security; (4) it guides software engineers toward a design that is amenable to formal verification with the aid of automated tools. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach at the hand of an application to the electronic purse standard common electronic purse specifications (released by Visa International and others). © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Model-based Design of Trustworthy Health Information Systems

ions: Medical applications define a domain with unique abstractions. PHRs are structured using unique ontology’s. Care protocols need to adopt a large variety of abstractions used for describing and characterizing treatment steps, their coordination and their relation to patient states and to the actors of clinical environments. It means that design of HIS’s can be hugely simplified by defining well defined, domain specific abstraction layers in the design process that have intuitive meaning, and precise enough to perform formal verifications. Integration: Healthcare environments and the embedded HIS’s are extremely heterogeneous due to the many factors that influence design. A large range of design aspects, such as information flows, organization models, document models, activity and event models, coordination and timing models, policy models, deployment models and others need to be created and related. Integration and management of these interrelated, heterogeneous models is a major challenge. Model-based design environments facilitate this complex task with tools and methods. Automation: HIS’s need to be highly flexible to local needs, procedures and best practices. There is no chance for acceptance of technologies that impose strong restrictions and rigidity on the treatment process. This makes customization an extremely important requirement. Affordability of customizable HIS’s require high level automation in translating high-level models (that capture variations) into verified, operational systems. Model-based system generation and verification tools can provide solution for this challenge. We believe that various flavors of the rapidly progressing model-based software and systems engineering technologies, such as Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [5], the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) [6], Model-Based Security Engineering (MBSE) [7] or Model Integrated Computing (MIC) [8] and others will play a key role in the future of HIS. Description of Papers The issue includes four contributions from researchers working on model-based software engineering and its application in HIS. A. Formally Defining Medical Processes The paper addresses the formal modeling of medical processes, or care protocols. The objective of the authors is to develop and test a method for precise process specification that has solid semantic foundation for conducting formal analysis of the models. The background of the proposed technique is the Little-JIL process definition language originally developed for software architecture modeling. Authors selected chemotherapy preparation and administration as a target application and have shown that their formal representation is able to capture the required complexity; properties can be verified using model checking. B. Model-Based Design of Clinical Information Systems The paper describes a new framework for the model-based design and implementation of clinical Information Systems. The Model Integrated Clinical Information Systems (MICIS) framework is implemented as a software toolkit that establishes high-level modeling abstractions for representing clinical information flows extended by a range of modeling aspects for the provider’s organization, documents, deployment architecture and privacy/security policies. The MICIS generators translate these high level models to an underlying SOA execution platform. C. Model-Based Security Analysis of the German Health Card Architecture The paper focuses on the methods used by the authors for analyzing the security of the German Health Card System. An essential aspect of any PHR implementation is security. The German Health Cards will include critical, highly sensitive data that will provide major help in healthcare delivery, but need to be carefully protected. The presented analysis of the security architecture of the system is based on UMLSec, the authors’ modeling language for security characteristics. D. Model-Based Assessment of Data Availability in Health Information Systems The core contribution of the paper is the development of a theoretically well established solution for assessing structural qualities of information systems. The authors propose an ontology for describing health information systems and show the practical impact of their method on information management.

Model-based Security Analysis of the German Health Card Architecture

Health-care information systems are particularly security-critical. In order to make these applications secure, the security analysis has to be an integral part of the system design and IT management process for such systems. This work presents the experiences and results from the security analysis of the system architecture of the German Health Card, by making use of an approach to model-based security engineering that is based on the UML extension UMLsec. The focus lies on the security mechanisms and security policies of the smart-card-based architecture which were analyzed using the UMLsec method and tools. Main results of the paper include a report on the employment of the UMLsec method in an industrial health information systems context as well as indications of its benefits and limitations. In particular, two potential security weaknesses were detected and countermeasures discussed. The results indicate that it can be feasible to apply a model-based security analysis using UMLsec to an industrial health information system like the German Health Card architecture, and that doing so can have concrete benefits (such as discovering potential weaknesses, and an increased confidence that no further vulnerabilities of the kind that were considered are present).