Analysis of Security Requirements Engineering: Towards a Comprehensive Approach

Software security is an increasingly important aspect of computing; however, it is still addressed as an after thought in too many development efforts. While a variety of approaches have been proposed for security requirements engineering, we find many still lacking with respect to their usability. In this proposal I describe my work in the area of security requirements engineering. SURE, Secure and Usable Requirements Engineering, is a new approach that supports non-security experts in order to specify security requirements from which testing artifacts can be derived. In addition, ASSURE, Automated Support for Secure and Usable Requirements Engineering, a system that implements the SURE technique is presented.

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.

Security is an important feature of the software. Integrating security requirements right at the beginning not only ensure secure software but also save a lot of precious time and reduce the effort of rework of software development team. However, to build a secure system is not an easy task and it is extremely difficult to develop a secure system, especially in the case of cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this paper, we propose a security requirements engineering framework that provides ways to determine security requirements throughout the requirements engineering phase which consists of a number of activities to elicit and finalize the security requirements for CPS. Additionally, we determine the activities that need to be implemented in the security requirements engineering framework to address security requirements for CPS. We compare our proposed security requirements engineering framework with other existing software security frameworks. The result shows that not all software security frameworks perform all the basic and important activities in the development of secure software systems. This may also result in a development of an unsecure cyber-physical systems. Furthermore, this comparison survey helps us to identify the short-comings in SRE frameworks which has been rectified in our proposed security requirements engineering framework for CPS.

Security is a concern that must be taken into consideration starting from the early stages of system development. Over the last two decades, researchers and engineers have developed a considerable number of methods for security requirements engineering. Some of them rely on the (re)use of security knowledge. Despite some existing surveys about security requirements engineering, there is not yet any reference for researchers and practitioners that presents in a systematic way the existing proposals, techniques, and tools related to security knowledge reuse in security requirements engineering. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by looking into drawing a picture of the literature on knowledge and reuse in security requirements engineering. The questions we address are related to methods, techniques, modeling frameworks, and tools for and by reuse in security requirements engineering. We address these questions through a systematic mapping study. The mapping study was a literature review conducted with the goal of identifying, analyzing, and categorizing state-of-the-art research on our topic. This mapping study analyzes more than thirty approaches, covering 20 years of research in security requirements engineering. The contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A framework was defined for analyzing and comparing the different proposals as well as categorizing future contributions related to knowledge reuse and security requirements engineering; (2) the different forms of knowledge representation and reuse were identified; and (3) previous surveys were updated. We conclude that most methods should introduce more reusable knowledge to manage security requirements.

Software systems are becoming more complex, interconnected and liable to adopt continuous change and evolution. It’s necessary to develop appropriate methods and techniques to ensure security and privacy of such systems. Research efforts that aim to ensure security and privacy of software systems are distinguished through two main categories: (1) the development of requirements engineering methods, and (2) implementation techniques. Approaches that fall in the first category usually aim to address either security or privacy in an implicit way, with emphasis on the security aspects by developing methods to elicit and analyse security (and privacy) requirements. Works that fall in the latter categories focus specifically on the later stages of the development process irrespective of the organisational context in which the system will be incorporated. This work introduces a model-based process for security and privacy requirements engineering. In particular, the authors’ work includes activities which support to identify and analyse security and privacy requirements for the software system. Their purpose process combines concepts from two well-known requirements engineering methods, Secure Tropos and PriS. A real case study from the EU project E-vote, i.e., an Internet based voting system, is employed to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.

Although there has been much research work in security requirements engineering, we do not have adequate ways of measuring this and other security engineering processes. In this paper, we study a measurement approach to security requirements engineering, align it with the Security Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) method, and use both the original and revised security requirements measurement approach to analyze projects that were developed with and without SQUARE.

[Context] Assuring safety and security from the earliest stages of development is essential, particularly for critical systems. However, addressing these requirements in complex and heterogeneous systems such as those based on the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging. These systems often operate in dynamic and diverse environments, where vulnerabilities can lead to severe consequences if not effectively mitigated. [Objective] This paper presents SafeSecRETS, a tool supporting safety and security Requirements Engineering (RE) for critical IoT systems. [Method] The tool features a collaborative pipeline with a strategic canvas-based IoT project planning and an extended Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) method for safety and security. [Results] SafeSecRETS assists requirements engineers, domain experts, and other stakeholders in collaboratively defining project scope and eliciting, analyzing, and specifying system requirements. Its interconnected visual components guide users through this process, fostering engagement among information, people, and decision-making. A case study on an automated insulin delivery system illustrates the tool’s applicability and presents its structured and integrated approach to RE safer and more secure critical IoT systems. SafeSecRETS demo video: https://zenodo.org/records/17000378

Traditional approaches to business process modelling deal with security only after the business process has been defined, namely without considering security needs as input for the definition. This may require very costly corrections if new security issues are discovered. Moreover, security concerns are mainly considered at the system level without providing the rationale for their existence, that is, without taking into account the social or organizational perspective, which is essential for business processes related to considerably large organizations. In this paper, we introduce a framework for engineering secure business processes. We propose a security requirements engineering approach to model and analyze participants’ objectives and interactions, and then derive from them a set of security requirements that are used to annotate business processes. We capture security requirements through the notion of social commitment, that is a promise with contractual validity between participants. We illustrate the framework by means of an Air Traffic Management scenario.

We present a pattern system/or security requirements engineering, consisting of security problem frames and concretized security problem frames. These are special kinds of problem frames that serve to structure, characterize, analyze, and finally solve software development problems in the area of software and system security. We equip each frame with formal preconditions and postconditions. The analysis of these conditions results in a pattern system that explicitly shows the dependencies between the different frames. Moreover, we indicate related frames, which are commonly used together with the considered frame. Hence, our approach helps security engineers to avoid omissions and to cover all security requirements that are relevant for a given problem

Considering the multitude of security requirements engineering methodologies available today, selecting a security requirement engineering methodology that fits the security engineering context becomes a promising task. In previous work, we outlined a generic evaluation methodology to elicit and evaluate the anticipated characteristics of a security requirements engineering methodology according to the stakeholders' working context. In this paper, we detail each step of our methodology using an example context of network security requirements engineering.

Requirements specifications for high-assurance secure systems are rare in the open literature. This paper examines the development of a requirements document for a multilevel secure system that must meet stringent assurance and evaluation requirements. The system is designed to be secure, yet combines popular commercial components with specialised high-assurance ones. Functional and non-functional requirements pertinent to security are discussed. A multidimensional threat model is presented. The threat model accounts for the developmental and operational phases of system evolution and for each phase accounts for both physical and non-physical threats. We describe our team-based method for developing a requirements document and relate that process to techniques in requirements engineering. The system requirements document presented provides a calibration point for future security requirements engineering techniques intended to meet both functional and assurance goals.

In this chapter, we describe general issues in developing security requirements, meth-ods that have been useful, and a method (SQUARE) that can be used for eliciting, analyzing, and documenting security requirements for software systems. SQUARE, which was developed by the CERT Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Soft-ware Engineering Institute, provides a systematic approach to security requirements engineering. SQUARE has been used on a number of client projects by Carnegie Mellon student teams, prototype tools have been developed, and research is ongoing to improve this promising method.

Requirements engineering, a vital component in successful project development, often neglects sufficient attention to security concerns. Further, industry lacks a useful model for incorporating security requirements into project development. Studies show that upfront attention to security saves the economy billions of dollars. Industry is thus in need of a model to examine security and quality requirements in the development stages of the production lifecycle.In this paper, we examine a methodology for both eliciting and prioritizing security requirements on a development project within an organization. We present a model developed by the Software Engineering Institute's Networked Systems Survivability (NSS) Program, and then examine two case studies where the model was applied to a client system. The NSS Program continues to develop this useful model, which has proven effective in helping an organization understand its security posture.

e-Tendering is an electronic processing of the tender document via internet and allow tenderer to publish, communicate, access, receive and submit all tender related information and documentation via internet.This study aims to design the e-Tendering system using Rational Unified Process approach.RUP provides a disciplined approach on how to assign tasks and responsibilities within the software development process. RUP has four phases that can assist researchers to adjust the requirements of various projects with different scope, problem and the size of projects. RUP is characterized as a use case driven, architecture centered, iterative and incremental process model. However the scope of this study only focusing on Inception and Elaboration phases as step to develop the model and perform only three of nine workflows (business modeling, requirements, analysis and design). RUP has a strong focus on documents and the activities in the inception and elaboration phases mainly concern the creation of diagrams and writing of textual descriptions. The UML notation and the software program, Star UML are used to support the design of e-Tendering. The e-Tendering design based on the RUP approach can contribute to e-Tendering developers and researchers in e-Tendering domain.In addition, this study also shows that the RUP is one of the best system development methodology that can be used as one of the research methodology in Software Engineering domain related to secured design of any observed application.This methodology has been tested in various studies in certain domains, such as in Simulation-based Decision Support, Security Requirement Engineering, Business Modeling and Secure System Requirement, and so forth.As a conclusion, these studies showed that the RUP one of a good research methodology that can be adapted in any Software Engineering (SE) research domain that required a few artifacts to be generated such as use case modeling, misuse case modeling, activity diagram, and initial class diagram from a list of requirements as identified earlier by the SE researchers

Most requirements engineers are poorly trained to elicit, analyze, and specify security requirements, often confusing them with the architectural security mechanisms that are traditionally used to fulfill them. They thus end up specifying architecture and design constraints rather than true security requirements. This article defines the different types of security requirements and provides associated examples and guildlines with the intent of enabling requirements engineers to adequately specify security requirements without unnecessarily constraining the security and architecture teams from using the most appropriate security mechanisms for the job.