A model based security requirements engineering framework applied for online trading system

Over the past few years, different online stock brokers have developed a wide variety of web-enabled financial trading systems. End-users of the systems, the stock investors and traders, have been given a choice what online trading system they prefer using, weighing in commission cost and the online research capabilities they pay for when analyzing stocks and mutual funds. After years of assessing online trading systems, it appears that end-user requirements have substantially changed with the evolution of financial markets. Low commission cost and research capabilities are now standard packages available across different online trading systems and are not the competitive features they once were. This research initiative intends to find out evolving end-user requirements for online trading systems and what has been done by systems developers to improve financial trading systems. This research involves the testing and use of three different online trading systems to assess how these systems are addressing end-user requirements.

A technique to include computer security, safety, and resilience requirements as part of the requirements specification

End-to-end security in the cloud has gained even more importance after the outbreak of data breaches and massive surveillance programs around the globe last year. While the community features a number of cloud-based security mechanisms, existing solutions either provide security at the expense of the economy of scale and cost effectiveness of the cloud (i.e., at the expense of resource sharing and deduplication techniques), or they meet the latter objectives at the expense of security (e.g., the customer is required to fully trust the provider). In this paper, we shed light on this problem, and we analyze the challenges in reconciling security and functional requirements in existing multi-tenant clouds. We also explore the solution space to effectively enhance the current security offerings of existing cloud storage services. As far as we are aware, this is the first contribution which comprehensively explores possible avenues for reconciling the current cloud trends with end-to-end security requirements.

Currently, the customer's demands have expressively amplified their expectations of getting software at a high-quality level. However, the non-functional requirements of the software products attention have been expanded in both the academic and the industrial fields; so, there is no framework for specifying and measuring such kinds of quality constraints for the security requirements of software product quality. This paper presents an integrated framework of the early specification and measurement of the functional and non-functional software security requirements. Such a measurement framework would help software and systems engineers to improve product qualities whether the software has already been delivered or has yet to be built. The main steps that have been followed include: identify, specify and measure the software security requirements based on ISO/IEC SQuaRE series of international standards for software product quality. A standard measurement framework used to measure the functional size of the software product quality to develop a functional size measurement of the functional and non-functional security requirements is described. As a result, a functional size measurement framework of the functional and non-functional security requirements (SPQNFSR) using international standards is proposed. An automatic teller machine case study for the measurement of security requirements based on perspectives of a software functional user requirements is presented. Finally, it is concluded that it is essential to develop such a functional size measurement framework for functional and non-functional security requirements to support developers to face the challenges derived from early dealing with such requirements.

Embedded systems shape and govern our world today. We can hardly imagine a life without these systems. Examples are mobile phones, DVD players, pacemakers, train control systems, and automotive components. Embedded systems are frequently part of complex safety-critical systems that can be found in the following domains: automotive, avionics, medical, consumer electronics, automation. A main characteristic of the development process of these complex safety-critical systems is the division of labour. The manufacturer usually decomposes the complex system into subsystems and assigns the development of these subsystems to divisions within the company or to external suppliers. Once they are developed, the manufacturer integrates them into the system. Of course, the suppliers get a list of requirements, that the subsystem they are responsible for, should fulfil. However, they usually have a lot of freedom in developing these subsystems. The manufacturer, on the other hand, has a black-box view on the supplied subsystems and is only able to make small modifications and, thus, integration of the subsystems into a complex system is a challenging task. The communication between suppliers and manufacturer can and should be improved. If each supplier develops not only his own subsystem, but makes also his expectations with regard to other subsystems and the overall system explicit, this would facilitate integration a lot. Yet, frequently, these expectations remain implicit and are not documented in a systematic and structured way. To facilitate integration, suppliers should document not only the requirements their developed subsystem fulfils but also the assumptions they make about the environment of the subsystem, i.e. the domain knowledge. However, it is not sufficient to tell developers to document domain knowledge. Since domain knowledge is knowledge about the environment and the environment is a part of the real world, the question is what to document. Actually, everything could be documented. Developers need guidance as regards the questions what to document and how. Of course, there are existing approaches that provide support in this regard. However, they do not take the peculiarities of embedded systems development and the challenges that arise from them into account. The main objective of this thesis is therefore to develop methods that support software documentation during requirements engineering and are tailored to the peculiarities of embedded systems development. An embedded system must satisfy different types of requirements. For each type of requirement, a different type of domain knowledge must be documented. In this thesis, we answer the questions which type of domain knowledge must be documented for which type of requirement and how it should be documented. We consider functional requirements, safety requirements, security requirements, trustworthiness requirements, and product line requirements. We consider functional requirements since these are relevant for each system. Safety requirements are important because embedded control systems are frequently part of complex safety-critical systems (like cars and airplanes). Today, these safety-critical systems are connected to the Internet which results in new challenges regarding security and trustworthiness of these systems. Therefore, we also consider security and trustworthiness requirements. Suppliers developing embedded control systems often use product line engineering approaches since they develop usually not only one system but different versions of this system to be able to supply the whole market and not only a single customer. Therefore, we consider also product line requirements. The methods that we developed are all problem-based. This means that we use problem diagrams for documentation, since they are well suited for this purpose. To illustrate the applicability of the developed methods, we use two case studies from the automotive domain.

Formal methods offer a precise and concise way of expressing system requirements which can be tested and validated with formal proofs techniques. However, their application in the development of security aware industrial systems have been associated with high costs due to the difficulty in integrating the functional and security requirements which are generated in an ad hoc manner. Reducing this cost has been a subject of interest in software requirements engineering research. In this paper we propose a formal technique for concurrent generation of functional and security requirements that can help provide a systematic way of accounting for security requirements while specifying the functional requirements of a software. With this technique, the functional behaviors of the system are precisely defined using the Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language (SOFL). The security rules are systematically explored with the results incorporated into the functional specification as constraints. The resultant specification then defines the system functionality that implies the conformance to the security rules. Such a specification can be used as a firm foundation for implementation and testing of the implementation. We discuss the principle of integrating security rules with functional specifications and present a case study to demonstrate the feasibility of our technique.

Most people handle bank notes every day without giving them a thought, let alone pondering their complexity. Yet every aspect of a bank note is highly engineered to serve its purpose. Every facet of the bank note's existence, from the materials that comprise them to the equipment that produces them, from the machines that handle them to the shredders that destroy them, is carefully considered and designed. Layered on these functional requirements are human factors and the need to verify their authenticity, to be able to distinguish them from any other printed documents that clever would-be, ill-intentioned imitators might produce.In the context of today's print-on-demand environment and the glitter-and-glow appeal of craft and display products to all segments of society, the requirements for achieving this differentiation from the counterfeiters' best products are increasingly challenging.This presentation addresses how real bank notes are made, the practical factors that drive their function and form requirements and the interplay of these factors with their security requirements, to inhibit the manufacture of counterfeit bank notes.

Software systems, component-based systems (CBS) in particular, have a lot of vulnerabilities that may be exploited by intruders. Companies spend much time and money to patch them up. It is partly due to the fact that a system's security features are often added to the system after its functional requirements have been addressed. As such, system security features are not systematically designed into the system, and consequently the system has inherent security holes. Therefore, there is a strong need for a systematic engineering approach to developing secure and robust systems, especially distributed systems, by considering functional and security requirements at the same time. In particular, these systems should be highly adaptive and reconfigurable in order to resist different types of attacks and failures. This paper introduces a reference architecture, called Secrobat, for creating secure and robust CBS. It has several key features including defensive components and the adaptive and reconfigurable architecture with the hybrid peer/super-peer structure. The reference architecture is illustrated with an example gaming system.

Secure software engineering is concerned with developing software systems that will continue delivering its intended functionality despite a multitude of harmful software technologies that can attack these systems from anywhere and at anytime. Misuse cases and mal-activity diagrams are two techniques to model functional security requirements address security concerns early in the development life cycle. This allows system designers to equip their systems with security mechanisms built within system design rather than relying on external defensive mechanisms. In a model-driven engineering process, misuse cases are expected to drive the construction of mal-activity diagrams. However, a systematic approach to transform misuse cases into mal-activity diagrams is missing. Therefore, this process remains dependent on human skill and judgment, which raises the risk of developing mal-activity diagrams that are inconsistent with the security requirements described in misuse cases, leading to the development of an insecure system. This paper presents an authoring structure for misuse cases and a transformation technique to systematically perform this desired model transformation. A study was conducted to evaluate the proposed technique using 46 attack stories outlined in a book by a former well-known hacker (Mitnick and Simon in The art of deception: controlling the human element of security, Wiley, Indianapolis, 2002). The results indicate that applying the proposed technique produces correct mal-activity diagrams from misuse cases.

Engineering secure software remains a significant challenge for today's software organizations as they struggle to understand the implications of security o the system and develop systems that guarantee specified software security properties. Despite many software engineering advances, current methods for deriving a design from a set of requirements that guarantee the retention of the intended security properties remains difficult and often unachievable. If security requirements are formalized and transformed into design using formal methods, the result would reduce the potential for security vulnerabilities through better clarity, completeness, and consistency. To this end, we outline a requirements-driven security engineering approach for deriving design specifications from security requirements that guarantee security properties specified in requirements are retained. We build on the goal-oriented KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) framework to formally construct a complete, consistent, and clear security requirements model. The resulting model is then transformed to the B language to derive security design specifications. Using B enables us to further implement the design while preserving requirements relevant security properties. Using the B refinement mechanism, we generate design specifications and ultimately implementation. The approach treats security-specific elements in a systematic and constructive way while considering security early in the development lifecycle with assurance of completeness, consistency and clarity throughout the development. Moreover, our approach allows for requirement traceability at the various phases of development that helps security evaluators to have more confidence in the target of evaluation.

Industry managers have long recognized the vital importance of information security for their businesses, but at the same time they perceived security as a technology-driven rather then a business-driven field. Today, this notion is changing and security management is shifting from technology- to business-oriented approaches. Whereas there is evidence of this shift in the literature, this paper argues that security standards and academic work have not yet taken it fully into account. We examine whether this disconnect has lead to a misalignment of IT security requirements in businesses versus industry standards and academic research. We conducted 13 interviews with practitioners from 9 different firms to investigate this question. The results present evidence for a significant gap between security requirements in industry standards and actually reported security vulnerabilities. We further find mismatches between the prioritization of security factors in businesses, standards and real-world threats. We conclude that security in companies serves the business need of protecting information availability to keep the business running at all times.

Security is concerned with the protection of assets from intentional harm. Secure systems provide capabilities that enable such protection to satisfy some security requirements. In a world increasingly populated with mobile and ubiquitous computing technology, the scope and boundary of security systems can be uncertain and can change. A single functional component, or even multiple components individually, are often insufficient to satisfy complex security requirements on their own. Adaptive security aims to enable systems to vary their protection in the face of changes in their operational environment. Collaborative security, which we propose in this paper, aims to exploit the selection and deployment of multiple, potentially heterogeneous, software-intensive components to collaborate in order to meet security requirements in the face of changes in the environment, changes in assets under protection and their values, and the discovery of new threats and vulnerabilities. However, the components that need to collaborate may not have been designed and implemented to interact with one another collaboratively. To address this, we propose a novel framework for collaborative security that combines adaptive security, collaborative adaptation and an explicit representation of the capabilities of the software components that may be needed in order to achieve collaborative security. We elaborate on each of these framework elements, focusing in particular on the challenges and opportunities afforded by (1) the ability to capture, represent, and reason about the capabilities of different software components and their operational context, and (2) the ability of components to be selected and mediated at runtime in order to satisfy the security requirements. We illustrate our vision through a collaborative robotic implementation, and suggest some areas for future work.

Nowadays, it is impossible to ignore the implementation of security features in information systems since they manage important assets that are critical for the business processes of organizations. In this aspect, there have been several researches for introducing the security analysis in different stages of software development life cycle. Among those solutions, one of the most interesting one is the usage of misuse cases. Misuse cases, which are extensions of the well-known use cases, were created for defining security requirements. A misuse case can be considered as the inverse of a use case and it defines functions that the system should not allow. Even though, misuse cases are very useful for eliciting security requirements, they do not provide a mechanism to prioritize such requirements. Therefore, they do not address the problem of optimal risk management. Software engineers often have to work within a given set of budget constraints that may impede them from implementing all possible countermeasures. Thus, the software engineer needs to find a way to prioritize the security requirements to decide which requirements will be developed. Motivated by the mentioned limitation of misuse cases, the presented paper proposes an enhanced misuse case model which incorporates a method for prioritization of security requirements.

The article focuses on studying and implementing a method of assigning access rights to the applications in a corporate mobile network with different requirements for security, which will allow considering the specific activities of multiple users. The existing solutions for assigning access rights to applications and services of the intranet are analyzed, the need to create a method that ensures information security when implementing access in corporate networks with different requirements for the level of security is substantiated. Due to the results of analysis of trends and development prospects of modern corporate mobile networks there has been found a contradiction between the requirements for information security of universal mobile devices with access to secure services and technical capabilities of information security systems that ensure access security in the corporate networks with different security requirements. To solve the problem, a multi-user system has been implemented that ensures operation of any computer equipment and mobile devices of an organization whose DBMS has a client-server architecture. The functional requirements for the developed method include the ability to perform user authorization, providing the administrator with the ability to manage user access rights to various applications, managing application storage, recording user operations, and keeping records. In the course of the software implementation of the method of assigning access rights, the design of the database is described in stages, a model of information flows is built, a physical diagram of the interaction of individual procedures is considered, on the basis of which the database is created, a user interface with forms that display information stored in the database is developed.

This paper presents the evaluation of a multidimensional IT security measurement method. The underlying solution was developed for the target group of handicraft business as micro-enterprises, i.e. 1 to 9 persons in the context of German industry and IT security requirements. The study aims to test hypotheses. Furthermore, it is to be determined which staged IT security status the subject groups have and which differences arise after a second measurement. In the result of the study the status quo of the target group and an increase of the IT security by application of the results of the measuring instrument after the 1. measurement is to be seen.