Security Requirements Engineering Research Articles

Comprehensive Analysis of Security Requirements Engineering Approaches with Assurance Perspective

Given the wide distribution of software and its current growth, security is inevitable, and software systems have become more complex. To avoid the complexity and protect valuable assets of software systems, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of security requirement engineering (SRE) and security assurance advise incorporating security requirements early in software development life cycle (SDLC). Nowadays, security requirements specification and identification are an active research area for ensuring the effectiveness of software systems. However, security requirement identification is a challenging task due to sheer numbers of threats and attacks to a software system. Previous researchers have identified different SRE techniques, each looking at the same problem from a different perspective. Therefore, a literature review conducted on SRE techniques. We compared and analyzed different SRE techniques to find the most suitable SRE techniques for researchers and practitioners. Selected SRE techniques compared based on various parameters, such as different attributes, requirement elicitation, requirement analysis, project size, and integration of standards. The literature also indicates that among SRE approaches, security quality requirements engineering (SQAURE), secure tropos, security requirements engineering process (SREP), and comprehensive lightweight application security process (CLASP) are the most used SRE approaches that focus on activities such as threats, security requirements identification, and security objectives identification. Unfortunately, several SRE approaches fail to explicitly integrate the security standard and security assurance perspective. Three questions developed for this study: Question 1 is based on comparison of existing SRE approaches, Question 2 is based on SRE with security requirements elicitation and analysis, and Question 3 highlights the incorporation of security requirements assurance by SRE approaches implicitly or explicitly. The researcher must work with the developer to easily adopt SRE approaches to elicit and ensure security requirements for the software system.

Software Development Teams Knowledge and Awareness of Security Requirement Engineering and Security Requirement Elicitation and Analysis

Software security is a concern due to software's pervasiveness and how rapid software's are developed. Although studies have emphasized the importance of addressing security requirements during the early phases of requirement engineering, it is often overlooked. This oversight may stem from limited knowledge and awareness among software development teams regarding security requirement engineering (SRE) and security requirement elicitation analysis (SREA). To assess this, a quantitative study was conducted. Respondents completed a survey, and the data was analysed using descriptive statistics. The results indicate that software development teams possessed an average knowledge of SRE but demonstrated good knowledge of SREA.

Evaluation of requirement engineering best practices for secure software development in GSD: An ISM analysis

AbstractTechnological advancement makes the world a global village. Security is an evergreen and everlasting area, because of the continuous threat from Hackers and Crackers. The immense use of software systems has modernized human society in every aspect. Thus, it is crucial to devise new processes, techniques, and tools to support teams in the development of secure code from the early stages of the software development process, while potentially reducing the costs and shortening the time to market. Considering the significance of software security, it is important to consider the security practices from the early phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC), that is, requirements engineering (RE). Hence, this study aims to identify and categorize RE practices important to apply for secure software development (SSD) in a geographically distributed development environment. To study the RE practices concerning SSD, we conducted a questionnaire survey with industrial experts in the global software development (GSD) context.Furthermore, the interpretive structure modeling (ISM) approach was applied to evaluate the relationship between the RE security practice core categories. This paper identifies 70 practices and classifies them into 11 fundamental dimensions (categories) to assist GSD organizations in specifying the requirements for SSD. The ISM results show that the “Awareness of Secure Requirement Engineering (SRE)” category has the most decisive influence on the other 10 core categories of the identified RE security practices. With the help of empirical evidence and the ISM approach, this work attempts to identify potential security practices and to give a set of secure RE practices that can be used to improve the security of the software development process.

Identifying Key Activities, Artifacts and Roles in Agile Engineering of Secure Software with Hierarchical Clustering

Different activities, artifacts, and roles can be found in the literature on the agile engineering of secure software (AESS). The purpose of this paper is to consolidate them and thus identify key activities, artifacts, and roles that can be employed in AESS. To gain initial sets of activities, artifacts, and roles, the literature was first extensively reviewed. Activities, artifacts, and roles were then cross-evaluated with similarity matrices. Finally, similarity matrices were converted into distance matrices, enabling the use of Ward’s hierarchical clustering method for consolidating activities, artifacts, and roles into clusters. Clusters of activities, artifacts, and roles were then named as key activities, artifacts, and roles. We identified seven key activities (i.e., security auditing, security analysis and testing, security training, security prioritization and monitoring, risk management, security planning and threat modeling; and security requirements engineering), five key artifacts (i.e., security requirement artifacts, security repositories, security reports, security tags, and security policies), and four key roles (i.e., security guru, security developer, penetration tester, and security team) in AESS. The identified key activities, artifacts, and roles can be used by software development teams to improve their software engineering processes in terms of software security.

Security Requirements Prioritization Techniques: A Survey and Classification Framework

Security requirements Engineering (SRE) is an activity conducted during the early stage of the SDLC. SRE involves eliciting, analyzing, and documenting security requirements. Thorough SRE can help software engineers incorporate countermeasures against malicious attacks into the software’s source code itself. Even though all security requirements are considered relevant, implementing all security mechanisms that protect against every possible threat is not feasible. Security requirements must compete not only with time and budget, but also with the constraints they inflect on a software’s availability, features, and functionalities. Thus, the process of security requirements prioritization becomes an integral task in the discipline of risk-analysis and trade-off-analysis. A sound prioritization technique provides guidance for software engineers to make educated decisions on which security requirements are of topmost importance. Even though previous research has proposed various security requirement prioritization techniques, none of the existing research efforts have provided a detailed survey and comparative analysis of existing techniques. This paper uses a literature survey approach to first define security requirements engineering. Next, we identify the state-of-the-art techniques that can be adopted to impose a well-established prioritization criterion for security requirements. Our survey identified, summarized, and compared seven (7) security requirements prioritization approaches proposed in the literature.

An Efficient Identification of Security Threats in Requirement Engineering Methodology.

Today, we completely rely on Information Technology (IT) applications for every aspect of daily life, including business and online transactions. In addition to using these IT-enabled applications for business purposes, we also use WhatsApp, Facebook, and a variety of other IT applications to communicate with others. However, there will undoubtedly be a drawback to every benefit. Since everything is linked to the Internet, there are many opportunities for security to be compromised. To address this, we are working to identify security threats early on in the software development process, specifically during the requirements phase. During the requirement engineering process, an engineer can recognize the security specifications in a more structured manner to create threat-free software. In our research work, we suggest the Identification of Security Threats during Requirement Engineering (ISTDRE) technique for detecting security risks throughout the requirement engineering process. The four points that make up this ISTDRE technique are Hack Point (HP), Speculation Point (SP), Trust Point (TP), and Reliable Point (RP). The new ISTDRE methodology will be validated using a case study of an ERP system involving two currently used methodologies: Model Oriented Security Requirements Engineering (MOSRE) and System Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE).

Challenges in threat modelling of new space systems: A teleoperation use-case

A growing number of adversaries are targeting space missions, and as such, there have been increasing academic and industrial efforts in identifying threats and risks through modelling techniques. In parallel, the research communities are collaborating to lower the entry barriers for space activities to deliver more innovative and cost-effective space missions. This evolution has been termed as New Space. However, this transformation of the space ecosystem has led to changes in the threat landscape, introducing new threat vectors and threat actors intent on compromising space systems and missions. As a result, it is expected that cyber threats could increase against space systems. Furthermore, teleoperation, a significant use case for building extraterrestrial habitats, has already been shown vulnerable in other domains as well. For example, teleoperated robots developed for remote surgery have been shown to be vulnerable to threats, such as malicious control due to an elevation-of-privilege attack. Threat modelling is a systematic and structured method to determine associated system vulnerabilities, possible attack entry points and vectors, and potential impacts on the system. In this work, we examine the efficacy of the de facto threat modelling methods such as STRIDE/DREAD in capturing highly adaptive security requirements and threats from a system-centric perspective for the teleoperation mission scenario. Understanding and protecting these hardware-software assets and their interaction in the mission is of foremost importance since security breaches threaten human safety across the broader New Space ecosystem. This research presents the limitations of existing threat modelling approaches in capturing hardware-software interaction in space systems, which is an open area for scientific enquiry. Moreover, research challenges are raised to improve the safety and security of the teleoperation mission. The output of this work can then be used to develop more appropriate threat modelling approaches to support security requirement engineering for different New Space mission scenarios.

SECRS TEMPLATE TO AID NOVICE DEVELOPERS IN SECURITY REQUIREMENTS IDENTIFICATION AND DOCUMENTATION

The security requirements are one of the non-functional requirements (NFR) which acts as a constraint on the functions of the system to be built. Security requirements are important and may affect the entire quality of the system. Unfortunately, many organizations do not pay much attention to it. The security problems should be focused on the early phases of the development process i.e. in the requirements phase to stop the problems spreading down in the later phases and in turn to avoid the rework. Subsequently, when security requirements are to be focused, proper guidance should be provided which should assist requirements engineers. Many security requirements engineering methods were developed in the past which require different level of expertise such as SQUARE process which requires requirements engineer to have a certain level of security expertise. Moreover, it lacks proper guidance especially for novice developers in applying the existing security requirements engineering (SecRE) methods to identify security requirements. Hence, this study intends to address the gap by developing a guided template to assist novice developers in the security requirements identification and documentation. The main objectives of the research are: 1) to study and investigate the existing security requirements engineering (SecRE) methods. 2) To develop a template to aid novice developers in identifying and documenting security requirements. The developed template is applied to two case studies of software projects to determine its usability and applicability. The results of the case studies evaluation show that both the usability and applicability of the template is good. The template is also evaluated by several experts and software practitioners. The evaluation results show that the SecRS template is found to be satisfying the usability and applicability factors; thereby confirming that the proposed template achieves its desired objective of aiding the novice developers to identify and document security requirements correctly.

Visualising personas as goal models to find security tensions

Purpose This paper aims to present a tool-supported approach for visualising personas as social goal models, which can subsequently be used to identify security tensions. Design/methodology/approach The authors devised an approach to partially automate the construction of social goal models from personas. The authors provide two examples of how this approach can identify previously hidden implicit vulnerabilities and validate ethical hazards faced by penetration testers and their safeguards. Findings Visualising personas as goal models makes it easier for stakeholders to see implications of their goals being satisfied or denied and designers to incorporate the creation and analysis of such models into the broader requirements engineering (RE) tool-chain. Originality/value The approach can be used with minimal changes to existing user experience and goal modelling approaches and security RE tools.

A Methodological Approach to Evaluate Security Requirements Engineering Methodologies: Application to the IREHDO2 Project Context

An effective network security requirement engineering is needed to help organizations in capturing cost-effective security solutions that protect networks against malicious attacks while meeting the business requirements. The diversity of currently available security requirement engineering methodologies leads security requirements engineers to an open question: How to choose one? We present a global evaluation methodology that we applied during the IREHDO2 project to find a requirement engineering method that could improve network security. Our evaluation methodology includes a process to determine pertinent evaluation criteria and a process to evaluate the requirement engineering methodologies. Our main contribution is to involve stakeholders (i.e., security requirements engineers) in the evaluation process by following a requirement engineering approach. We describe our experiments conducted during the project with security experts and the feedback we obtained. Although we applied it to evaluate three requirements engineering methods (KAOS, STS and SEPP) in the context of network security, our evaluation methodology can be instantiated in other contexts and other methods.

Software Security Requirement Engineering for Risk and Compliance Management

The objective of the research work is to propose a software based security requirement engineering model using categorical and morphisms theory. The earlier security requirement engineering models focus different viewpoints on parallel processing and develop rewrite based knowledge centred models but does not include different functional mappings between the security objects to select the best strategy. The security models have not considered the needed security functions that are to be implemented in different environments with different levels of executions. The proposed requirement engineering model is based on the formal theory of category of objects and the morphisms between them in addition to n categories and multiple morphisms that were used to organize the security requirement functional objects of different categories. The on demand security requirement objects, morphisms and the uncertain events in any one of the subsystems are considered to manage this security requirement category as an algebraic data types. The collection of security requirement objects using classification and clustering techniques are implicitly applied by the formation of category and morphism. The risk and compliances both in the form of direct and indirect categories are mapped so as to provide a security assurance functors with minimum risk on the requirements to the next design state. An ‘n’ category and ‘n’ morphic model for software security requirement model is proposed towards for minimum security risks through efficient compliance management techniques.

Software Security Requirement Engineering for Risk and Compliance Management

The objective of the research work is to propose a software based security requirement engineering model using categorical and morphisms theory. The earlier security requirement engineering models focus different viewpoints on parallel processing and develop rewrite based knowledge centred models but does not include different functional mappings between the security objects to select the best strategy. The security models have not considered the needed security functions that are to be implemented in different environments with different levels of executions. The proposed requirement engineering model is based on the formal theory of category of objects and the morphisms between them in addition to n categories and multiple morphisms that were used to organize the security requirement functional objects of different categories. The on demand security requirement objects, morphisms and the uncertain events in any one of the subsystems are considered to manage this security requirement category as an algebraic data types. The collection of security requirement objects using classification and clustering techniques are implicitly applied by the formation of category and morphism. The risk and compliances both in the form of direct and indirect categories are mapped so as to provide a security assurance functors with minimum risk on the requirements to the next design state. An ‘n’ category and ‘n’ morphic model for software security requirement model is proposed towards for minimum security risks through efficient compliance management techniques.

A fuzzy TOPSIS based analysis toward selection of effective security requirements engineering approach for trustworthy healthcare software development

BackgroundToday’s healthcare organizations want to implement secure and quality healthcare software as cyber-security is a significant risk factor for healthcare data. Considering security requirements during trustworthy healthcare software development process is an essential part of the quality software development. There are several Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) methodologies, framework, process, standards available today. Unfortunately, there is still a necessity to improve these security requirements engineering approaches. Determining the most suitable security requirements engineering method for trustworthy healthcare software development is a challenging process. This study is aimed to present security experts’ perspective on the relative importance of the criteria for selecting effective SRE method by utilizing the multi-criteria decision making methods.MethodsThe study was planned and conducted to identify the most appropriate SRE approach for quality and trustworthy software development based on the security expert’s knowledge and experience. The hierarchical model was evaluated by using fuzzy TOPSIS model. Effective SRE selection criteria were compared in pairs. 25 security experts were asked to response the pairwise criteria comparison form.ResultsThe impact of the recognized selection criteria for effective security requirements engineering approaches has been evaluated quantitatively. For each of the 25 participants, comparison matrixes were formed based on the scores of their responses in the form. The consistency ratios (CR) were found to be smaller than 10% (CR = 9.1% < 10%). According to pairwise comparisons result; with a 0.842 closeness coefficient (Ci), STORE methodology is the most effective security requirements engineering approach for trustworthy healthcare software development.ConclusionsThe findings of this research study demonstrate various factors in the decision-making process for the selection of a reliable method for security requirements engineering. This is a significant study that uses multi-criteria decision-making tools, specifically fuzzy TOPSIS, which used to evaluate different SRE methods for secure and trustworthy healthcare application development.

A Systematic Review and Analytical Evaluation of Security Requirements Engineering Approaches

Security is an inevitable concern in today’s scenario of software-based application’s pervasiveness and development practices. Researchers and practitioners frequently advocate that security-related aspects should be integrated and incorporated right from the beginning of SDLC. Security requirements engineering (SRE) plays an important role during the inceptive phases of software development. Thereby, we conducted a systematic review of the current state of the literature related to SRE. In total, we selected and analyzed 108 relevant studies. After analyzing the selected studies, we identified 20 different SRE approaches and compared them on different technical parameters like ‘performance in the requirements subphase,’ ‘usability with respect to size and complexity of the project,’ ‘notation used,’ ‘industry recognition/adoption,’ ‘tool support,’ ‘standards integration’ and ‘elicitation technique used.’ The results of this study are based on the comparative analysis of the SRE approaches, their analytical evaluation by the authors and trends observed during the course of the review. The major findings of this study indicate that SRE approaches like ‘Misuse case, Secure Tropos, SEPP and SQUARE’ are most popular among researchers while UML-based approaches like ‘Misuse Case, SecureUML and UMLsec’ are easily adaptable approaches. Threat modeling as an activity is adapted by most of the SRE approaches while few approaches support risk analysis. In addition, among several other findings, our study indicates that most of the SRE approaches fail to integrate security standards and formal methods. The contribution of this work is consequently that of supplying researchers with a summarized comparison of existing SRE approaches, along with the best practices adopted in the field of security requirements engineering. The insights provided here on selection appropriateness may prove to be instrumental for research in the area and may significantly facilitate both researchers and practitioners.

Security Requirements Engineering in Safety-Critical Railway Signalling Networks

Securing a safety-critical system is a challenging task, because safety requirements have to be considered alongside security controls. We report on our experience to develop a security architecture for railway signalling systems starting from the bare safety-critical system that requires protection. We use a threat-based approach to determine security risk acceptance criteria and derive security requirements. We discuss the executed process and make suggestions for improvements. Based on the security requirements, we develop a security architecture. The architecture is based on a hardware platform that provides the resources required for safety as well as security applications and is able to run these applications of mixed-criticality (safety-critical applications and other applications run on the same device). To achieve this, we apply the MILS approach, a separation-based high-assurance security architecture to simplify the safety case and security case of our approach. We describe the assurance requirements of the separation kernel subcomponent, which represents the key component of the MILS architecture. We further discuss the security measures of our architecture that are included to protect the safety-critical application from cyberattacks.

ReqPriSec: Security and Privacy aware Web-based Versatile Requirement Engineering Tool

ReqPriSec: Security and Privacy aware Web-based Versatile Requirement Engineering Tool

Sealed computation: a mechanism to support privacy-aware trustworthy cloud service

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to propose an approach to avoid having to trust a single entity in cloud-based applications. In cloud computing, data processing is delegated to a remote party for efficiency and flexibility reasons. A practical user requirement usually is data privacy; hence, the confidentiality and integrity of data processing needs to be protected. In the common scenarios of cloud computing today, this can only be achieved by assuming that the remote party does not in any form act maliciously.Design/methodology/approachAn approach that avoids having to trust a single entity is proposed. This approach is based on two concepts: the technical abstraction of sealed computation, i.e. a technical mechanism to confine a privacy-aware processing of data within a tamper-proof hardware container, and the role of an auditing party that itself cannot add functionality to the system but is able to check whether the system (including the mechanism for sealed computation) works as expected.FindingsDiscussion and analysis of the abstract, technical and procedural requirements of these concepts and how they can be applied in practice are explained.Originality/valueA preliminary version of this paper was published in the proceedings of the second International Workshop on SECurity and Privacy Requirements Engineering (SECPRE, 2018).

Towards Developing Security Requirements Modeling for Outsourcing Software Projects

One of the most important aspects in achieving secure software systems in the software development process is security requirements engineering. It is crucial to take security concerns in the beginning of the development process. Outsourcing is a phrase used to describe the practice of seeking resources or subcontracting specific task to outside. Currently, project managers particularly in Malaysian Public Sector are facing challenges in security requirements. Project managers need a proper security modeling as a guideline to ensure the requirements meet. Hence, there is a need to study on security requirements modeling since it had become a crucial requirements since software is vulnerable to various attack. This paper proposes a study which focuses on the security requirement modeling in outsourcing software project in Malaysian Public Sector. We believe that security; privacy and trust requirements must be well collected, analyzed and specified through various stages of Requirements Engineering (RE) itself.

A Readiness Model for Security Requirements Engineering

The focus on secure software development has been growing steadily in all phases of the software development life cycle. Security awareness in the requirements engineering stage of software development is important in building secure software. One of the major issues faced by the software industry is that many organizations undertake secure software development initiatives without knowing whether they are ready to undertake them. Currently, there is no model to measure the readiness of security requirements engineering in an organization. The objective of this paper is to develop a security requirements engineering readiness model (SRERM) to enable organizations to assess their security requirements engineering (SRE) readiness levels. In order to achieve this goal, a systematic mapping study was conducted to identify the relevant studies in the SRE domain. A total of 104 primary studies were identified, and available evidence was synthesized into 12 security requirements categories and 76 best practices to build a SRERM. Initially, two case studies were conducted in order to evaluate the SRERM in a real-world environment. Based on the outcomes of the two case studies, some modifications were proposed to further improve the SRERM. After modifying the SRERM, two more case studies were conducted in order to evaluate the modifications made to the SRERM. The case study results indicate that the SRERM has the ability to identify the readiness levels of SRE in the software industry.

A Goal based Framework by adopting SQUARE Process for Privacy and Security Requirement Engineering

A Goal based Framework by adopting SQUARE Process for Privacy and Security Requirement Engineering