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Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Automating the early detection of security design flaws(2020-10-16); ; ; Security by design is a key principle for realizing secure software systems and it is advised to hunt for security flaws from the very early stages of development. At design-time, security analysis is often performed manually by means of either threat modeling or expert-based design inspections. However, when leveraging the wide range of established knowledge bases on security design flaws (e.g., CWE, CAWE), these manual assessments become too time consuming, error-prone, and infeasible in the context of contemporary development practices with frequent iterations. This paper focuses on design inspection and explores the potential for automating the application of inspection rules to speed up the security analysis. The contributions of this paper are: (i) the creation of a publicly available data set consisting of 26 design models annotated with security flaws, (ii) an automated approach for following inspection guidelines using model query patterns, and (iii) an empirical comparison of the results from this automated approach with those from manual inspection. Even though our results show that a complete automation of the security design flaw detection is hard to achieve, we find that some flaws (e.g., insecure data exposure) are more amenable to automation. Compared to manual analysis techniques, our results are encouraging and suggest that the automated technique could guide security analysts towards a more complete inspection of the software design, especially for large models.Publicationtype: Conference Paper60 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Towards automated security design flaw detection(2019-11); ; ; ; Efficiency of security-by-design has become an important goal for organizations implementing software engineering practices such as Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Integration. Software architectures are (often manually) analyzed at design time for potential security design flaws, based on natural language descriptions of security weaknesses (e.g., CWE, CAPEC). The use of natural language hinders the application of such knowledge bases in an automated fashion. In this paper, we analyze an existing catalog of 19 security design flaws in order to identify conceptual, technology-independent requirements on architectural models that enable automatically detecting these flaws. This constitutes the first step towards automated assessment of design-level security. Our findings are illustrated on an IoT-based smart home system.Publicationtype: Conference Paper25 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , A lingua franca for security by designThe principle of security by design is advocated by academia as well as industry. Unfortunately, its adoption in practice is not yet widespread. We believe a reason for this is the lack of a 'lingua franca' for security modelling. Such a language should support security specialists to precisely describe the security aspects in a software design, as well as simultaneously serve to communicate with a broader audience of stakeholders. For this paper, we have assessed how well a formally backed security modelling language we previously proposed, suits the needs of the needs of these two groups. Concretely, we report on a large user study investigating how well security novices are able to comprehend the foundations of our language. Furthermore, to assess our language's practicality, we show how it can be used to create a realistic model of authentication. We have found that our language's foundations are comprehensible to a broader audience and they allow to precisely model a design's security aspects, albeit some shortcomings requiring attention have been identified. Based on these findings, we believe that a precise yet comprehensible security by design lingua franca is within reach.Publicationtype: Conference Paper27 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Design notations for secure software: a systematic literature review(2017-07-01); ; ; In the past 10 years, the research community has produced a significant number of design notations to represent security properties and concepts in a design artifact. These notations are aimed at documenting and analyzing security in a software design model. The fragmentation of the research space, however, has resulted in a complex tangle of different techniques. Hence, practitioners are confronted with the challenging task of scouting the right approach from a multitude of proposals. Similarly, it is hard for researchers to keep track of the synergies among the existing notations, in order to identify the existing opportunities for original contributions. This paper presents a systematic literature review that inventorizes the existing notations and provides an in-depth, comparative analysis for each.Publicationtype: Journal Article25 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , A model for provably secure software designBoth academia and industry advocate the security by design principle to stress the importance of dealing with security from the earliest stages in software development. Nevertheless, designers often have to resort to their own knowledge and experience to pro-actively identify and mitigate potential security problems. Moreover, research shows that correctly applying security solutions is a much more significant challenge for designers, rather than finding an adequate solution. Therefore, there is a need for techniques that ensure a correct application of a security design solution. The contribution of this paper is a model in which the security-relevant aspects of a design can be precisely expressed in an integrated manner, enabling thorough reasoning about these aspects. We illustrate this model with a sizeable model of a banking system and show how the precise semantics of this model enables the tool-supported construction of proofs about the correctness of the applied design solutions. Our proposal thus enables designers to obtain stronger guarantees, ensuring the correctness of their solutions. The presented model can serve as the foundation for security by design, in time enabling automated security verification throughout the software development cycle.Publicationtype: Conference Paper21 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , A modular meta-model for security solutions(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2017-04-03); ; ; Designing a secure software system requires the ability to represent and reason about a wide variety of security concerns. Existing modelling representations lack a comprehensive set of security building blocks or lack support for composition or refinement of the design under consideration. We propose a new modular metamodel for representing these security designs. This model supports both composition for more complex solutions and representing different levels of abstraction to model the underlying details. This meta-model can subsequently be used for the construction of security solutions, supporting a wide range of mechanisms on a wide variety of abstraction levels, thereby providing a foundation for the security-by-design approach.Publicationtype: Conference Paper23 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Empirical research on security and privacy by design: What (not) to expect as a researcher or a reviewer(Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2017); ; ; ; Research on software security and privacy is very active, and new techniques and methods are proposed frequently. In practice, however, adoption is relatively slow, especially for techniques and methods in the early software engineering phases. There is an increasing awareness both in industry and in academic research that complex non-functional cross-cutting concerns such as security and privacy inherently require up-front attention, much in line with the principles of software quality by design. There is a wide range of goals that an empirical study about secure design can try to tackle. Usually, at the highest level, the goal of a study is to demonstrate that a (new) design approach is "good enough" in practice, or "better" than some other approach. Studies on security and privacy by design usually require a description of some system to work on. Ideally, this is an existing and realistic system for which the security relevant requirements and design decisions have been explicitly articulated.Publicationtype: Book Part28 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , SoSPa: A system of security design patterns for systematically engineering secure systems(IEEE, 2015-09); ; ; ; Model-Driven Security (MDS) for secure systems development still has limitations to be more applicable in practice. A recent systematic review of MDS shows that current MDS approaches have not dealt with multiple security concerns systematically. Besides, catalogs of security patterns which can address multiple security concerns have not been applied efficiently. This paper presents an MDS approach based on a unified System of Security design Patterns (SoSPa). In SoSPa, security design patterns are collected, specified as reusable aspect models to form a coherent system of them that guides developers in systematically addressing multiple security concerns. SoSPa consists of not only interrelated security design patterns but also a refinement process towards their application. We applied SoSPa to design the security of crisis management systems. The result shows that multiple security concerns in the case study have been addressed by systematically integrating different security solutions.Publicationtype: Conference Paper17 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Evolution of security engineering artifacts: A state of the art surveySecurity is an important quality aspect of modern open software systems. However, it is challenging to keep such systems secure because of evolution. Security evolution can only be managed adequately if it is considered for all artifacts throughout the software development lifecycle. This article provides state of the art on the evolution of security engineering artifacts. The article covers the state of the art on evolution of security requirements, security architectures, secure code, security tests, security models, and security risks as well as security monitoring. For each of these artifacts the authors give an overview of evolution and security aspects and discuss the state of the art on its security evolution in detail. Based on this comprehensive survey, they summarize key issues and discuss directions of future research.Publicationtype: Book Part23 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Do security patterns really help designers?Security patterns are well-known solutions to security-specific problems. They are often claimed to benefit designers without much security expertise. We have performed an empirical study to investigate whether the usage of security patterns by such an audience leads to a more secure design, or to an increased productivity of the designers. Our study involved 32 teams of master students enrolled in a course on software architecture, working on the design of a realisticallysized banking system. Irrespective of whether the teams were using security patterns, we have not been able to detect a difference between the two treatment groups. However, the teams prefer to work with the support of security patterns.Publicationtype: Conference Paper15