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Item type:Publication, Access status: with files , Managing security evidence in safety-critical organizationsWith the increasing prevalence of open and connected products, cybersecurity has become a serious issue in safety-critical domains such as the automotive industry. As a result, regulatory bodies have become more stringent in their requirements for cybersecurity, necessitating security assurance for products developed in these domains. In response, companies have implemented new or modified processes to incorporate security into their product development lifecycle, resulting in a large amount of evidence being created to support claims about the achievement of a certain level of security. However, managing evidence is not a trivial task, particularly for complex products and systems. This paper presents a qualitative interview study conducted in six companies on the maturity of managing security evidence in safety-critical organizations. We find that the current maturity of managing security evidence is insufficient for the increasing requirements set by certification authorities and standardization bodies. Organizations currently fail to identify relevant artifacts as security evidence and manage this evidence on an organizational level. One part of the reason are educational gaps, the other a lack of processes. The impact of AI on the management of security evidence is still an open question.Publicationtype: Journal Article10 73 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: with files , Detection strategies for microservice security tactics(2024-05-01); ; ; ; Microservice architectures are widely used today to implement distributed systems. Securing microservice architectures is challenging because of their polyglot nature, continuous evolution, and various security concerns relevant to such architectures. This article proposes a novel, model-based approach providing detection strategies to address the automated detection of security tactics (or patterns and best practices) in a given microservice architecture decomposition model. Our novel detection strategies are metrics-based rules that decide conformance to a security recommendation based on a statistical predictor. The proposed approach models this recommendation using Architectural Design Decisions (ADDs). We apply our approach for four different security-related ADDs on access management, traffic control, and avoiding plaintext sensitive data in the context of microservice systems. We then apply our approach to a model data set of 10 open-source microservice systems and 20 variants of those systems. Our results are detection strategies showing a very low bias, a very high correlation, and a low prediction error in our model data set.Publicationtype: Journal Article53 57 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Automatic extraction of security-rich dataflow diagrams for microservice applications written in Java(2023-08); Dataflow diagrams (DFDs) are a valuable asset for securing applications, as they are the starting point for many security assessment techniques. Their creation, however, is often done manually, which is time-consuming and introduces problems concerning their correctness. Furthermore, as applications are continuously extended and modified in CI/CD pipelines, the DFDs need to be kept in sync, which is also challenging. In this paper, we present a novel, tool-supported technique to automatically extract DFDs from the implementation code of microservices. The technique parses source code and configuration files in search for keywords that are used as evidence for the model extraction. Our approach uses a novel technique that iteratively detects new keywords, thereby snowballing through an application's codebase. Coupled with other detection techniques, it produces a fully-fledged DFD enriched with security-relevant annotations. The extracted DFDs further provide full traceability between model items and code snippets. We evaluate our approach and the accompanying prototype for applications written in Java on a manually curated dataset of 17 open-source applications. In our testing set of applications, we observe an overall precision of 93% and recall of 85%. The dataset created for the evaluation is openly released to the research community, as additional contribution of this work.Publicationtype: Journal Article65 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , CASCADE: An Asset-driven Approach to Build Security Assurance Cases for Automotive Systems(2023-02-20); ; ; ; Security Assurance Cases (SAC) are structured arguments and evidence bodies used to reason about the security of a certain system. SACs are gaining focus in the automotive industry, as the needs for security assurance are growing in this domain. However, the state-of-the-arts lack a mature approach able to suit the needs of the automotive industry. In this article, we present CASCADE, an asset-driven approach for creating SAC, which is inspired by the upcoming security standard ISO/SAE-21434 as well as the internal needs of automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). CASCADE also differentiates itself from the state-of-the-art by incorporating a way to reason about the quality of the constructed security assurance case. We created the approach by conducting an iterative design science research study. We illustrate the results using the example case of the road vehicle's headlamp provided in the ISO standard. We also illustrate how our approach aligns well with the structure and content of the ISO/SAE-21434 standard, hence demonstrating the practical applicability of CASCADE in an industrial context.Publicationtype: Journal Article35 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: with files , CONSERVE: A framework for the selection of techniques for monitoring containers security(Elsevier, 2022-04); ; ; ; Context: Container-based virtualization is gaining popularity in different domains, as it supports continuous development and improves the efficiency and reliability of run-time environments. Problem: Different techniques are proposed for monitoring the security of containers. However, there are no guidelines supporting the selection of suitable techniques for the tasks at hand. Objective: We aim to support the selection and design of techniques for monitoring container-based virtualization environments. Approach:: First, we review the literature and identify techniques for monitoring containerized environments. Second, we classify these techniques according to a set of categories, such as technical characteristic, applicability, effectiveness, and evaluation. We further detail the pros and cons that are associated with each of the identified techniques. Result: As a result, we present CONSERVE, a multi-dimensional decision support framework for an informed and optimal selection of a suitable set of container monitoring techniques to be implemented in different application domains. Evaluation: A mix of eighteen researchers and practitioners evaluated the ease of use, understandability, usefulness, efficiency, applicability, and completeness of the framework. The evaluation shows a high level of interest, and points out to potential benefits.Publicationtype: Journal ArticleScopus© Citations 5 57 503 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: with files , Security assurance cases - state of the art of an emerging approachSecurity Assurance Cases (SAC) are a form of structured argumentation used to reason about the security properties of a system. After the successful adoption of assurance cases for safety, SAC are getting significant traction in recent years, especially in safety-critical industries (e.g., automotive), where there is an increasing pressure to be compliant with several security standards and regulations. Accordingly, research in the field of SAC has flourished in the past decade, with different approaches being investigated. In an effort to systematize this active field of research, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of the existing academic studies on SAC. Our review resulted in an in-depth analysis and comparison of 51 papers. Our results indicate that, while there are numerous papers discussing the importance of SAC and their usage scenarios, the literature is still immature with respect to concrete support for practitioners on how to build and maintain a SAC. More importantly, even though some methodologies are available, their validation and tool support is still lacking.Publicationtype: Journal ArticleScopus© Citations 6 122 265 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Security assurance cases for road vehicles: An industry perspective(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2020-08); ; ; ; Assurance cases are structured arguments that are commonly used to reason about the safety of a product or service. Currently, there is an ongoing push towards using assurance cases also for cybersecurity, especially in safety critical domains, like automotive. While the industry is faced with the challenge of defining a sound methodology to build security assurance cases, the state of the art is rather immature. Therefore, we have conducted a thorough investigation of the (external) constraints and (internal) needs that security assurance cases have to satisfy when used in the automotive industry. This has been done with 28 participants and in the context of two large automotive companies located in Europe: Company A is a passenger car manufacturer, while Company B is a truck manufacturer. An extended version of this paper is available online at https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14106.Publicationtype: Conference Paper45