Security Requirements Engineering Research Articles

A Survey of Approaches Reconciling between Safety and Security Requirements Engineering for Cyber-Physical Systems

The fields of safety and security use different conceptual standards and methods. As a consequence, these two separate but related research areas utilize different approaches. Addressing the integration between safety and security concerns in this context, we would conduct a survey exploring approaches and standards that were created by the scholars to combine safety and security requirement engineering.

Analysis of Security Requirements Engineering: Towards a Comprehensive Approach

Software’s security depends greatly on how a system was designed, so it’s very important to capture security requirements at the requirements engineering phase. Previous research proposes different approaches, but each is looking at the same problem from a different perspective such as the user, the threat, or the goal perspective. This creates huge gaps between them in terms of the used terminology and the steps followed to obtain security requirements. This research aims to define an approach as comprehensive as possible, incorporating the strengths and best practices found in existing approaches, and filling the gaps between them. To achieve that, relevant literature reviews were studied and primary approaches were compared to find their common and divergent traits. To guarantee comprehensiveness, a documented comparison process was followed. The outline of our approach was derived from this comparison. As a result, it reconciles different perspectives to security requirements engineering by including: the identification of stakeholders, assets and goals, and tracing them later to the elicited requirements, performing risk assessment in conformity with standards and performing requirements validation. It also includes the use of modeling artifacts to describe threats, risks or requirements, and defines a common terminology.

Reusable knowledge in security requirements engineering: a systematic mapping study

Security is a concern that must be taken into consideration starting from the early stages of system development. Over the last two decades, researchers and engineers have developed a considerable number of methods for security requirements engineering. Some of them rely on the (re)use of security knowledge. Despite some existing surveys about security requirements engineering, there is not yet any reference for researchers and practitioners that presents in a systematic way the existing proposals, techniques, and tools related to security knowledge reuse in security requirements engineering. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by looking into drawing a picture of the literature on knowledge and reuse in security requirements engineering. The questions we address are related to methods, techniques, modeling frameworks, and tools for and by reuse in security requirements engineering. We address these questions through a systematic mapping study. The mapping study was a literature review conducted with the goal of identifying, analyzing, and categorizing state-of-the-art research on our topic. This mapping study analyzes more than thirty approaches, covering 20 years of research in security requirements engineering. The contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A framework was defined for analyzing and comparing the different proposals as well as categorizing future contributions related to knowledge reuse and security requirements engineering; (2) the different forms of knowledge representation and reuse were identified; and (3) previous surveys were updated. We conclude that most methods should introduce more reusable knowledge to manage security requirements.

Quality Assurance of Security Requirement Engineering in Socio- Technical Systems

Quality assurance is a continuous process to check whether specified requirements are being fulfilled by a system or service. Quality assurance checks for the defects before they get into the final product. In this research a comprehensive survey of various literatures has been carried out to ensure quality standards. Different quality assurance techniques have been employed in this research that help in improving the quality of the socio technical systems from the perspective of security requirement engineering. The analysis of various type of literature reveals that after applying techniques presented in the literature review shows improvement in the performance of the socio technical systems. Tropos, SeeCo (Security via commitments), formative user centered evaluation technique, three-layer framework, Si*(Secure i*) ontology are the different techniques discussed throughout the research that ensures the quality standards. Some of the quality evaluation tools like STStool and STS-ml are also used in the research for quality assurance. This research also assesses the improvements of security requirement engineering in socio technical systems after applying Quality evaluation techniques.

Security Requirements Engineering

Security Requirements Engineering

An integrated system for information security management with the unified framework

Information security management plays an essential role for drawing the roadmap of information security; thus, many theoretical methodologies and practical standards are brought into this domain. However, many standards and methodologies are too cumbersome to be adopted by an organization. Additionally, there is no unified framework to systematically handle the tedious tasks of information security management. This study’s primary goal is to design an integrated system for information security management (ISISM) that aims to use current methodologies and standards to solve the above-mentioned issues. Because business impact analysis and risk analysis are the most important areas within this domain, we carefully select the related methods and then integrate them into a unified framework, upon which the proposed ISISM depends. To achieve this outcome for this study, security requirement engineering is adopted, which enables the designed system to support system users in generating risk assessment reports with related information security policies.

Capturing security requirements for software systems

Security is often an afterthought during software development. Realizing security early, especially in the requirement phase, is important so that security problems can be tackled early enough before going further in the process and avoid rework. A more effective approach for security requirement engineering is needed to provide a more systematic way for eliciting adequate security requirements. This paper proposes a methodology for security requirement elicitation based on problem frames. The methodology aims at early integration of security with software development. The main goal of the methodology is to assist developers elicit adequate security requirements in a more systematic way during the requirement engineering process. A security catalog, based on the problem frames, is constructed in order to help identifying security requirements with the aid of previous security knowledge. Abuse frames are used to model threats while security problem frames are used to model security requirements. We have made use of evaluation criteria to evaluate the resulting security requirements concentrating on conflicts identification among requirements. We have shown that more complete security requirements can be elicited by such methodology in addition to the assistance offered to developers to elicit security requirements in a more systematic way.

Survey and analysis on Security Requirements Engineering

Security Requirements Engineering is a new research area in software engineering, with the realization that security must be analyzed early during the requirements phase. Many researchers are working in this area; however, there is a lack in security requirements treatment. The security requirements are one of the non-functional requirements, which act as constraints on functions of the system. Organizations are depending on information systems for communicating and sharing information. Thus, IT security is becoming central in fulfilling business goals, to guard assets and to create trustworthy systems. To develop systems with adequate security features, it is essential to capture the security requirements. In this paper, we present a view on Security Requirements, issues, types, Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) and methods. We analyzed and compared different methods and found that SQUARE and Security Requirements Engineering Process methods cover most of the important activities of SRE. The developers can adopt these SRE methods and easily identify the security requirements for software systems.

Model Based Process to Support Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering

Software systems are becoming more complex, interconnected and liable to adopt continuous change and evolution. It’s necessary to develop appropriate methods and techniques to ensure security and privacy of such systems. Research efforts that aim to ensure security and privacy of software systems are distinguished through two main categories: (1) the development of requirements engineering methods, and (2) implementation techniques. Approaches that fall in the first category usually aim to address either security or privacy in an implicit way, with emphasis on the security aspects by developing methods to elicit and analyse security (and privacy) requirements. Works that fall in the latter categories focus specifically on the later stages of the development process irrespective of the organisational context in which the system will be incorporated. This work introduces a model-based process for security and privacy requirements engineering. In particular, the authors’ work includes activities which support to identify and analyse security and privacy requirements for the software system. Their purpose process combines concepts from two well-known requirements engineering methods, Secure Tropos and PriS. A real case study from the EU project E-vote, i.e., an Internet based voting system, is employed to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.

Security Requirements Engineering Process for Web Applications

In the recent years, tasks such as the Security Requirements Elicitation, the Specification of Security Requirements or the Security requirements Validation are essential to assure the Quality of the resulting software. An increasing part of the communication and sharing of information in our society utilizes Web Applications. Last two years have seen a significant surge in the amount of Web Application specific vulnerabilities that are disclosed to the public because of the importance of Security Requirements Engineering for Web based systems and as it is still under estimated. There-fore a thorough Security Requirements analysis is even more relevant. In this paper, we propose a Model oriented Security Requirement Engineering Process for Web Applications and applied our Process for E-Voting system. By applying Modeling technologies to Requirement phases, the Security requirements and domain knowledge can be captured in a well-defined model and it is better than traditional process.

Formative User-Centered Evaluation of Security Modeling

Developing a security modeling language is a complex activity. Particularly, it becomes very challenging for Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) languages where social/organizational concepts are used to represent high-level business aspects, while security aspects are typically expressed in a technical jargon at a lower level of abstraction. In order to reduce this socio-technical mismatch and reach a high quality outcome, appropriate evaluation techniques need to be chosen and carried out throughout the development process of the modeling language. In this article, the authors present and discuss the formative user-centered evaluation approach, namely an evaluation technique that starts since the early design stages and actively involves end-users. The authors demonstrate the approach in a real case study presenting the results of the evaluation. From the gained empirical evidence, we may conclude that formative user-centered evaluation is highly recommended to investigate any security modeling language.

Security Requirement Engineering Issues in Risk Management

refers the protection of software products from unauthorised access, alteration and destruction. Therefore, security requirement is a presently a major concern of software system and it is generally recommended to take care of security prior to software development process. Risk management is one of the most important aspects of security requirement engineering domain, which allows comparing security needs and costs of security measures. In this paper, we have discussed the incorporation of security issues in requirement engineering process. We have also proposed a method to match requirement engineering approaches with risk assessments approaches. The aim of this paper is to provide some models and methods to identify and include security in the early stage of software development process. KeywordSystem, Requirement Engineering, Security Requirements.

Security Requirements Engineering A Strategic Approach

This paper proposes a strategy which unifies the concepts of the two disciplines of requirements engineering and security engineering. From requirements engineering it takes the concept of functional goals, which are operationalized into functional requirements, with appropriate constraints. From security engineering it takes the concept of assets, together with threats of harm to those assets. Security goals aim to protect from those threats, and are operationalized into security requirements, which take the form of constraints on the functional requirements. In addition we explore the consequences of the fact that security is concerned with the protection of assets, while computers only provide interfaces. We show how to specify the relationship between security requirements and the specification of software behavior, using Jackson's Problem Frames approach.

Integrating privacy requirements considerations into a security requirements engineering method and tool

In this paper we examine a method for identifying privacy requirements within the context of a security requirements engineering method. We briefly describe the security quality requirements engineering (SQUARE) methodology. Next we discuss our definition of privacy and the associated privacy concerns. We discuss the challenges of privacy requirements engineering and the need for incorporating privacy considerations into security requirements engineering approaches. We describe a novel modification to the SQUARE method and tool to incorporate privacy considerations, and identify future work that will lead to a more integrated method for security and privacy requirements engineering.

Threat and Risk-Driven Security Requirements Engineering

In this paper, the author aim to present a threat and risk-driven methodology to security requirements engineering. The chosen approach has a strong focus on gathering, modeling, and analyzing the environment in which a secure ICT-system to be built is located. The knowledge about the environment comprises threat and risk models. As presented in the paper, this security-relevant knowledge is used to assess the adequacy of security mechanisms, which are then selected to establish security requirements.

Towards Tool-Support for Usable Secure Requirements Engineering with CAIRIS

Understanding how to better elicit, specify, and manage requirements for secure and usable software systems is a key challenge in security software engineering, however, there lacks tool-support for specifying and managing the voluminous amounts of data the associated analysis yields. Without these tools, the subjectivity of analysis may increase as design activities progress. This paper describes CAIRIS (Computer Aided Integration of Requirements and Information Security), a step toward tool-support for usable secure requirements engineering. CAIRIS not only manages the elements associated with task, requirements, and risk analysis, it also supports subsequent analysis using novel approaches for analysing and visualising security and usability. The authors illustrate an application of CAIRIS by describing how it was used to support requirements analysis in a critical infrastructure case study.

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.

Security requirements engineering framework for software product lines

Context The correct analysis and understanding of security requirements are important because they assist in the discovery of any security or requirement defects or mistakes during the early stages of development. Security requirements engineering is therefore both a central task and a critical success factor in product line development owing to the complexity and extensive nature of software product lines (SPL). However, most of the current SPL practices in requirements engineering do not adequately address security requirements engineering. Objective The aim of this approach is to describe a holistic security requirements engineering framework with which to facilitate the development of secure SPLs and their derived products. It will conform with the most relevant security standards with regard to the management of security requirements, such as ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 15408. Results This framework is composed of: a security requirements engineering process for SPL (SREPPLine) driven by security standards; a Security Reference Meta Model to manage the variability of those SPL artefacts related to security requirements; and a tool (SREPPLineTool) which implements the meta-model and supports the process. Method A complete explanation of the framework will be provided. The process will be formally specified with SPEM 2.0 and the repository will be formally specified with an XML grammar. The application of SREPPLine and SREPPLineTool will be illustrated through a description of a simple example as a preliminary validation. Conclusion Although there have been several attempts to fill the gap between requirements engineering and SPL requirements engineering, no systematic approach with which to define security quality requirements and to manage their variability and their related security artefacts in SPL models is, as yet, available. The contribution of this work is that of providing a systematic approach for the management of the security requirements and their variability from the early stages of product line development in order to facilitate the conformance of SPL products with the most relevant security standards.

Security Requirements Engineering for Evolving Software Systems

Long-lived software systems often undergo evolution over an extended period. Evolution of these systems is inevitable as they need to continue to satisfy changing business needs, new regulations and standards, and introduction of novel technologies. Such evolution may involve changes that add, remove, or modify features; or that migrate the system from one operating platform to another. These changes may result in requirements that were satisfied in a previous release of a system not being satisfied in subsequent versions. When evolutionary changes violate security requirements, a system may be left vulnerable to attacks. In this article we review current approaches to security requirements engineering and conclude that they lack explicit support for managing the effects of software evolution. We then suggest that a cross fertilization of the areas of software evolution and security engineering would address the problem of maintaining compliance to security requirements of software systems as they evolve.

THE SI* MODELING FRAMEWORK: METAMODEL AND APPLICATIONS

Security Requirements Engineering is emerging spurred by the realization that security must be dealt from the early phases of the system development process. Modeling languages in this field are challenging as they must provide concepts appropriate in order to talk about security within an organization. In previous work we introduced the SI* modeling language tailored to capture security aspects of socio-technical systems. SI* is founded on four main notions, namely supervision, permission, delegation, and trust. In this paper, we present the SI* metamodel. We also present some frameworks and methodologies founded on this modeling language for the analysis of security and dependability requirements as well as the exploration of design alternatives and the generation of skeletons of secure business processes. The paper also presents a development environment that uses the SI* metamodel as its basis core.