English

The rapid development and expansion of network based applications have changed the computing world in the last decade. However, this overwhelming success has an Achilles’ heel: almost every software controlled system faces threats from potential adversaries both from internal and external users of the highly connected computing systems. These software systems must be engineered with reliable protection mechanisms, while still delivering the expected value of the software to their customers within the budgeted time and cost. The principal obstacle in achieving the above two different but interdependent objectives is that current software engineering processes do notprovide enough support for the software developers to achieve security goals. In this chapter, we reemphasize the principal objectives of both software engineering and security engineering, and strive to identify the major steps of a software security engineering process that will be useful for building secure software systems. Both software engineering and security engineering are ever evolving disciplines, and software security engineering is still in its infancy. This chapter proposes a unification of the process models of software engineering and security engineering in order to improve the steps of the software life cycle that would better address the underlying objectives of both engineering processes. This unification will facilitate the incorporation of the advancement of the features of one engineering process into the other. The chapter also provides a brief overview and survey of the current state of the art of software engineering and security engineering with respect to computer systems.

Security affects every software component in different types of computing systems. Many vulnerabilities and attacks on software systems are due to security weaknesses in the software itself. During the process of software specification, development, or testing, security issues are either taken into consideration insufficiently or not at all. Such software, due to internal weaknesses is prone to new attacks. By teaching secure software engineering techniques for designing and developing software modules, students would learn systematic secure software development techniques, such as defect detecting and security testing. This paper presents a series of modules that are designed to be integrated into undergraduate software engineering courses from a security perspective. The goal of the modules is to teach the building of robust software security requirements, secure software design and development, and secure software verification through a secure software development lifecycle.

In this paper, we present our efforts at incorporating aspects of systems security and software security into the two-course senior capstone project sequence (Software Engineering and Senior Project courses) in the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum at Jackson State University. In this regard, we discuss: (i) the development of course modules and lab projects on security that were respectively taught and assigned to the students in the two capstone project course sequence, and (ii) the incorporation of aspects of systems and software security in the capstone projects that were conducted by our students during the academic year 2010-11. To further assist students on their capstone projects, we developed and offered two new elective courses on Systems and Software Security and Advanced Information Security in conjunction with the two capstone project courses during the Fall and Spring semesters as well as incorporated a network security module, lab projects and reading assignment to a regular Computer Networks course. We disseminate all of our course modules, lecture materials and lab project descriptions through an actively maintained website. Our approach could be adopted as a model for incorporating security in the software systems design and development courses in a computer science or software engineering curriculum.

Recent years have seen rapid increases in cybercrime. The use of effective software security activities plays an important part in preventing the harm involved. Objective research on industry use of software security practices is needed to help development teams, academic researchers, and educators to focus their activities. Since 2008, a team of researchers, including two of the authors, has been gathering objective data on the use of 121 software security activities. The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) study explores the activity use of 675,000 software developers, in companies including some of the world’s largest and most security-focused. Our analysis of the study data shows little consistent growth in security activity adoption industry-wide until 2015. Since then, the data shows a strong increasing trend, along with the adoption of new activities to support cloud-based deployment, an emphasis on component security, and a reduction in security professionals’ policing role. Exploring patterns of adoption, activities related to detecting and responding to vulnerabilities are adopted marginally earlier than activities related to preventing vulnerabilities; and activities related to particular job roles tend to be used together. We also found that 12 developer security activities are adopted early, together, and notably more often than any others. From these results, we offer recommendations for software and security engineers, and corresponding education and research suggestions for academia. These recommendations offer a strong contribution to improving security in development teams in the future.

With increasing dependence on information technology and information system, enterprises are confronting with a more and more complicated information security environment. Thus, information security has become an intractable problem for many enterprises. Generally speaking, there are two methods to improve enterprises’ information security level, that is, technology and management means. Technology means mainly settle software and hardware security of computers and networks, while management means mainly regulate and restrain the entire enterprise system including software, hardware, and employees. At present, a lot of enterprises mostly employ the technology means to solve information security problems. However, the lack or imperfection of information security institutions leads to bad enterprise information security situation. Therefore, technology and management means to solve information security are complementary to each other. As such, it is urgent and necessary to establish and improve information security institutions for many enterprises. In fact, enterprise information security is a complicated activity which needs different sectors to get involved in. More specifically, the information security departments play the very critical role in the implementation of information security institutions, and all employees should comply with the information security policy. Therefore, only the top management teams have the ability to coordinate the relationship between different departments, determine the introduction of information technology, and deploy the information systems. In response, top management support has an important impact on the construct of information security institutions and the effectiveness of information security management. So far, few studies have investigated the mechanism that how top management support affects information security legitimation, and legitimation information security management. Therefore, it has great theoretical and practical significance to the exploration of whether the legitimation supported by top management can improve the effectiveness of information security management. The objective of the current study is to explore whether legitimation prompted by top management team can improve the effectiveness of enterprise information security management. By doing so, the data was collected from the enterprises which have passed the certification of information security management system, and analyzed by using PLS-SEM. The results indicate that information security awareness can improve top management support（including top management belief and top management participation）and the effectiveness of information security management respectively. In addition, top management belief can improve implementation（the first stage of legitimation）and internalization（the second stage of legitimation）. Moreover, implementation can improve the effectiveness of information security management. This paper analyzes the way to enhance effectiveness of information security management, which has a reality-oriented meaning for prompting information security management of enterprises from the standpoint of institution.

Due to the recent pandemic, the healthcare sector has been forced to incorporate new technologies into its systems, such as IoT and Fog Computing. However, being new technologies, they are prone to security breaches. From this context, it is identified that medical systems do not have a sufficient level of security, due to the use of new technologies such as IoT and the lack of controls to protect these new technologies. Therefore, a model for implementing an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Architecture with ISO/IEC 27001 security controls for remote patient monitoring is proposed. This model has 4 stages: Stage 1 selects an information security standard for the healthcare sector. Stage 2 selects the information security controls of the selected standard. Stage 3 selects and evaluates an IoMT architecture applicable to the healthcare sector. And Stage 4 designs the information security controls for each layer of the IoMT architecture. The IoMT architecture and information security controls are simulated and experimented with physicians (the productivity of the system) and with information security expert (the quality of the implemented controls). The results of the first experiment show that “effectiveness”, “productivity”, and “satisfaction” regarding the use of the IoMT architecture have an average rating of 4.05 (high level). The results of the second experiment show that “Information Security”, “Awareness” and “Security Incident Management” regarding the quality of the security controls implemented have an average rating of 3.65 (high level).

The importance of software security technologies is increasingly being recognized with the increase in services available on the Internet. It is important to foster human resources with knowledge and skills relevant to software security technologies. This paper proposes a learning process for software security and a learning environment that supports the learning process. In the learning process, learners create artifacts for software security from artifacts created in a traditional software engineering course, without dealing with software security, by referring to the reference information for software security (standards, methodologies, guidelines, security patterns, and so on). The learning environment supports storage of (1) the artifacts created in a traditional software engineering course, (2) artifacts created in a software security course, (3) the reference information and the relationships between different pieces of the reference information, (4) the rationale and association of the reference information with the artifacts created in a software security course, and (5) review comments and their association with the artifacts created in a software security course.

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.

The paper analyses the issues of confidentiality and publicity arising from current information security legislation in Hungary, especially of Act No. LXIX of 2024 on Hungary's Cybersecurity. First of all, information security as a state task is analyzed. In Hungary, information security controls of state and local government entities, and important private companies are regulated. Afterward, information security as a tool for data protection regulation, state secrets, and freedom of information was discussed. On the other hand, information security can be an object of the law, when the protection of security controls is required. One of the main findings of the research was that the information security controls applied at state entities are generally public data (according to freedom of information regulation). Thus it might not stay confidential.

PurposeEffective information security management is a strategic issue for organizations to safeguard their information resources. Strategic value alignment is a proactive approach to manage value conflict in information security management. Applying a critical success factor (CSF) analysis approach, this paper aims to propose a CSF model based on a strategic alignment approach and test a model of the main factors that contributes to the success of information security management.Design/methodology/approachA theoretical model was proposed and empirically tested with data collected from a survey of managers who were involved in decision-making regarding their companies’ information security (N = 219). The research model was validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling approach.FindingsOverall, the model was successful in capturing the main antecedents of information security management performance. The results suggest that with business alignment, top management support and organizational awareness of security risks and controls, effective information security controls can be developed, resulting in successful information security management.Originality/valueFindings from this study provide several important contributions to both theory and practice. The theoretical model identifies and verifies key factors that impact the success of information security management at the organizational level from a strategic management perspective. It provides practical guidelines for organizations to make more effective information security management.

Serious games provide a method for teaching students in an engaging, non-threatening way. To be useful educational tools, these games need to be designed with the lesson objectives in mind. This paper uses the Game Design Matrix to design a game from learning objectives. The lesson objectives focus on software development, security and operations (DevSecOps). DevSecOps requires judging the cost and risk trade offs between secure and unsecured software aspects including code, data and usability; devising a strategy to produce a system under threat; comprehending that partial security may equate to no security; and identifying examples of insecure code and methods of mitigating it. These lesson objectives combined with the teaching environment drive design decisions that produce a game that fits well into a graduate level course in secure software design and development. We evaluate the game in a graduate course on secure software design and development. Learner surveys confirm that DevSecOps conveys the learning objectives in an engaging way.

As software becomes more and more entrenched in everyday life in today’s society, security looms large as an unsolved problem. Despite advances in security mecha-nisms and technologies, most software systems in the world remain precarious and vulnerable. There is now widespread recognition that security cannot be achieved by technology alone. All software systems are ultimately embedded in some human social environment. The effectiveness of the system depends very much on the forces in that environment. Yet there are few systematic techniques for treating the social context of security together with technical system design in an integral way. In this chapter, we argue that a social ontology at the core of a requirements engineering process can be the basis for integrating security into a requirements driven software engineering process. We describe the i* agent-oriented modelling framework and show how it can be used to model and reason about security concerns and responses. A smart card example is used to illustrate. Future directions for a social paradigm for security and software engineering are discussed.

This article presents a systematic mapping study on the model‐driven engineering of safety and security concerns in software systems. Combined modeling and development of both safety and security concerns is an emerging field of research as both concerns affect one another in unique ways. Our mapping study provides an overview of the current state of the art in this field. This study carefully selected 143 publications out of 27,259 relevant papers through a rigorous and systematic process. This study then proposes and answers questions such as frequently used methods and tools and development stages where these concerns are typically investigated in application domains. Additionally, we identify the community's preference for publication venues and trends. The discussion on obtained results also features the gained insights and future research directions.

Today's software systems are riddled with security vulnerabilities that invite attack. We envisage a secure software design process at the architectural level, in which the security requirements are adequate, thus enabling appropriate security controls to be implemented to mitigate known threats and vulnerabilities. How can we ensure that the security requirements are adequate? In this paper, we tackle this question by focusing on how external online data sources for vulnerabilities, attack patterns, threat intelligence, and other security information can be leveraged, using Natural Language Processing (NLP), to produce a report to assist designers in validating the adequacy of the security requirements. This validation is done by determining which requirements map to known threats (identified from the external data), which requirements may be extraneous, and which threats may need a closer look to identify new requirements. We first describe the availability and nature of the external data, followed by how we employ NLP to process the data and produce the report. We include an illustrative example of our approach.

It has been reported in the literature that about twenty new software vulnerabilities are reported weekly. This situation has increased the security awareness in the software community. Nowadays, software services are expected not only to satisfy functional requirements but also to resist malicious attacks. As demand for more trustworthy systems is increasing, the software industry is adjusting itself to security standards and practices by increasing security assessment and testing effort. Even though there is a consensus that better software engineering is to improve software quality in the early stage of software development, so far, various approaches that have been proposed to analyze and quantitatively measure the software security target, primarily show the finished software products in their operational life. There are few achievements on how to reduce or effectively mitigate the security risks faced by software products during the development process. In this chapter, the authors introduce a novel model-driven perspective on secure software engineering, which integrates seamlessly software security analysis with traditional software development activities. A systematic security engineering process that starts in the early stages of the software development process and spans the entire software lifecycle is presented. Fundamental software security concepts and analysis techniques are also introduced, and several illustrative examples are presented, with focus on security requirements and risk analysis.