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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: 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 - 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 , Generative secure design, defined(2018-05); ; In software-intensive industries, companies face the constant challenge of not having enough security experts on staff in order to validate the design of the high-complexity projects they run. Many of these companies are now realizing that increasing automation in their secure development process is the only way forward in order to cope with the ultra-large scale of modern systems. This paper embraces that viewpoint. We chart the roadmap to the development of a generative design tool that iteratively produces several design alternatives, each attempting to solve the security goals by incorporating security mechanisms. The tool explores the possible solutions by starting from well-known security techniques and by creating variations via mutations and crossovers. By incorporating user feedback, the tool generates increasingly better design alternatives.Publicationtype: Conference Paper30 - 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 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 , MASC: Modelling architectural security concerns(IEEE, 2015-05); ; ; ; Security decisions are an important part of software architecture design, and thus deserve to be explicitly represented in the design documentation. While UML is the best-known language for creating such documentation, it lacks security specific notations, which makes it difficult to represent the effect of the security decisions. Several security extensions for UML exist in the literature, but they represent security concerns at a lower level of abstraction, or only support a limited subset of security concerns. We propose a new notation, MASC, to model security concerns at the architectural level. It has been designed as an extension of UML, and is based on recurring security concepts that have been distilled from well-known security principles, goals, and patterns. By using our notation, a designer obtains a technique to express security concerns more explicitly in the architectural design documentation.Publicationtype: Conference Paper15 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , Empirical assessment of security requirements and architecture: lessons learned(Springer, 2014); ; ; ; Over the past three years, our groups at the University of Leuven and the University of Trento have been conducting a number of experimental studies. In particular, two common themes can be easily identified within our work. First, we have investigated the value of several threat modeling and risk assessment techniques. The second theme relates to the problem of preserving security over time, i.e., security evolution. Although the empirical results obtained in our studies are interesting on their own, the main goal of this chapter is to share our experience. The objective is to provide useful, hands-on insight on this type of research work so that the work of other researchers in the community would be facilitated. The contribution of this chapter is the discussion of the challenges we faced during our experimental work. Contextually, we also outline those solutions that worked out in our studies and could be reused in the field by other studies.Publicationtype: Book part27 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Access status: without files , SecureChange: security engineering for lifelong evolvable systemsThe challenge of SecureChange is to re-invent security engineering for "eternal" systems. The project focuses on methods, techniques and tools to make change a first-class citizen in the software development process so that security is built into software-based systems in a resilient and certifiable way. Solving this challenge requires a significant re-thinking of all development phases, from requirements engineering to design and testing.Publicationtype: Conference Paper11