Framework for Eliciting Security Requirements of Web Application from Business Users

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.

With the development of software technology, software security is receiving more and more attention. Security requirement is a key stage in the process of software development. In the present research, we propose a method to elicit security requirements; that is developed based on safety knowledge base. In the method, we perform analysis based on the asset, threat and Common Criteria security function components. Then, we summarize the relationship of the three. Based on this, we establish a safety knowledge base. Starting from the functional requirements of the application system, the system assets will be analyzed and matched automatically based on the established safety knowledge base, and finally we elicit the security requirements. The approach is very effective for the purpose of security requirement analysis, and elicits security requirements easily and efficiently. It will be very helpful for security software development.KeywordsSecurity RequirementsAssetThreatSecurity Functional ComponentCommon Criteria

As we analyze the latest occurring Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), we understand that attackers tend to conduct their methods by various means and ways, and are not limited to just a single pattern. Even though threats are represented by using a variety of modeling techniques, very little research has been done to learn about the security requirements needed from the understanding of commonly rooted causes of these threats. We propose a layered conceptual framework to better understand the problem from specific instances to generalized abstractions, so that it can eventually provide a good set of security requirements. In this framework, we propose building the ontology based on the Goal-based Model and Activity Diagram, and showing how to understand the context of the problem domain with extended relationships between concepts. We expect that our work can provide a foundation of good insight of the problem domain of security requirements and that we elicit security requirements through this work based on a preliminary case study on Stuxnet.

Security is an important software quality attribute albeit, as a nonfunctional requirement, often overlooked. Although several approaches for security requirements engineering exist, it is not clear how to adapt security requirements to software end users. This poster aims to fill in this gap by developing a novel approach for acquiring security requirements by leveraging end user analysis and a security body of knowledge. To achieve this aim, we divide security requirements into two categories. Software security requirements are those that need to be technically implemented in the developed software. Training security requirements are those that aim to provide the necessary training to the end users that need it. The proposed approach may help security experts in security requirements engineering tailored to the characteristics of end users.

Security has become an important concern with the development of large scale distributed and heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS). One of the main problems in addressing security during the development of MAS is that security is often an afterthought. The cost involved to patch existing systems against vulnerabilities and attacks after deployment is high. If developers and designers can spend some quality time investigating security aspects before beginning to code then this cost can be reduced significantly. Also, using formal methods to specify the complex behavior of large scale software systems has resulted in reliable software systems. This research effort was focused on using formal methods early in the development lifecycle to specify security requirements for MAS. New solutions are emerging to fix security related issues, but how much thought gets in during the early phases of development in terms of security needs to be answered. In this paper, analysis of security requirements for MAS, existing solutions to secure MAS, and the use of formal methods to specify security requirements has been studied. Descartes-Agent, a formal specification language for specifying agent systems has been taken into study to model the security requirements of MAS early on in the development process. Functional specifications of MAS are modelled along with the non-functional security requirements using the Descartes-Agent specification language. This paper also describes the extensions made to the Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) to represent the security requirements of MAS. The extensions proposed to AUML are in accordance with the extensions made to the Descartes-Agent specification language. A case study example is used to illustrate the specification of security requirements in MAS using the Descartes-Agent.

While software security has become an expectation, stakeholders often have difficulty expressing such expectations. Elaborate (and expensive) frameworks to identify, analyze, validate and incorporate security requirements for large software systems (and organizations) have been proposed, however, small organizations working within short development lifecycles and minimal resources cannot justify such frameworks and often need a light and practical approach to security requirements engineering that can be easily integrated into their existing development processes. This work presents an approach for eliciting, analyzing, prioritizing and developing security requirements which can be integrated into existing software development lifecycles for small organizations. The approach is based on identifying candidate security goals using part of speech (POS) tagging, categorizing security goals based on canonical security definitions, and understanding the stakeholder goals to develop preliminary security requirements and to prioritize them. It uses a case study to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

There are many methodologies that have been proposed in the literature for identifying the security and privacy requirements that must be satisfied by an information system in order to protect its users. At the same time, there are several “privacy principles” that have been considered as equally important for the avoidance of privacy violation incidents. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no methodology that can cover both the identification of the security and privacy requirements and at the same time to take into account the main privacy principles. The consequence is that the designers of an information system usually follow an ad hoc approach for the identification of security/privacy requirements, thus failing to protect users in an effective way. This paper introduces the main idea behind a methodology that integrates the basic steps of well-established risk analysis methodologies with those of methodologies used for the identification of privacy requirements, considering, at the same time, the most well-known privacy principles. The proposed methodology aims to assist information system designers to come up with a complete and accurate list of all security and privacy requirements that must be satisfied by the system.

Auditing security of information flows is still considered as one of the challenges in business information systems development. There are different standards and approaches that address information security. However, due to the number of information assets that have to be audited and the frequency of their changes the audit becomes complex and sometimes too subjective. Therefore, to have an opportunity to audit information security at the business process level, we needed to find a method that gives the base structure for the audit activities and supports the choice of information assets for the audit. In this regard, the Security Requirement Elicitation from Business Process approach, which focuses on information security requirements in business processes, provided an idea to ground the audit approach in business processes and information flows in them in order to facilitate integrated consideration of both, business and technology, aspects during the audit.

Security is now the most critical feature of any computing systems. Eliciting and analyzing security requirements in the early stages of the system development process is highly recommended to reduce security vulnerabilities which might be found in the later stages of the system development process. In order to address this issue, we will propose a new extension of the misuse case diagram for analyzing and eliciting security requirements with special focus on assets and security goals. We will also present the process model in which business requirements and system requirements related to security features are separately analyzed and elicited in different phases. This process model helps us to analyze the requirements related to business goals in an earlier phase and to the system goals in a later phase so that any concerns related to them are dealt with separately. We will illustrate our approach with a case study taken from an accounting software package.

Context and motivation: Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are gaining priority over other systems. The heterogeneity of these systems increases the importance of security. Both the developer and the requirement analyst must consider details of not only the software, but also the hardware perspective, including sensor and network security. Several models for secure software engineering processes have been proposed, but they are limited to software; therefore, to support the processes of security requirements, we need a security requirements framework for CPSs. Question/Problem: Do existing security requirements frameworks fulfil the needs of CPS security requirements? The answer is no; existing security requirements frameworks fail to accommodate security concerns outside of software boundaries. Little or even no attention has been given to sensor, hardware, network, and third party elements during security requirements engineering in different existing frameworks. Principal Ideas/results: We have proposed, applied, and assessed an incremental security requirements evolution approach, which configures the heterogeneous nature of components and their threats in order to generate a secure system. Contribution: The most significant contribution of this paper is to propose a security requirements engineering framework for CPSs that overcomes the issue of security requirements elicitation for heterogeneous CPS components. The proposed framework supports the elicitation of security requirements while considering sensor, receiver protocol, network channel issues, along with software aspects. Furthermore, the proposed CPS framework has been evaluated through a case study, and the results are shown in this paper. The results would provide great support in this research direction.

Cloud computing has emerged as a fast-growing technology in the past few years. It provides a great flexibility for storing, sharing and delivering data over the Internet without investing on new technology or resources. In spite of the development and wide array of cloud usage, security perspective of cloud computing still remains its infancy. Security challenges faced by cloud environment becomes more complicated when we include various stakeholders' perspectives. In a cloud environment, security perspectives and requirements are usually designed by software engineers or security experts. Sometimes clients' requirements are either ignored or given a very high importance. In order to implement cloud security by providing equal importance to client organizations, software engineers and security experts, we propose a new methodology in this paper. We use Microsoft's STRIDE-DREAD model to assess threats existing in the cloud environment and also to measure its consequences. Our aim is to rank the threats based on the nature of its severity, and also giving a significant importance for clients' requirements on security perspective. Our methodology would act as a guiding tool for security experts and software engineers to proceed with securing process especially for a private or a hybrid cloud. Once threats are ranked, we provide a link to a well-known security pattern classification. Although we have some security pattern classification schemes in the literature, we need a methodology to select a particular category of patterns. In this paper, we provide a novel methodology to select a set of security patterns for securing a cloud software. This methodology could aid a security expert or a software professional to assess the current vulnerability condition and prioritize by also including client's security requirements in a cloud environment.

Selecting security mechanisms for complex software systems is a cumbersome process. The presence of multiple goals and architectural components, as well as cost and performance considerations, render decision-making a crucial but complicated aspect of a system’s design. In our work, we extend Secure Tropos, a security requirements engineering methodology, by introducing the concept of Risk in order to facilitate the elicitation and analysis of security requirements and also support a systematic risk assessment process during the system’s design time. Next, we use Constrained Goal Models to reason about optimal security mechanism combinations with respect to multiple objectives of the system-to-be, taking into account conflicting functional and non-functional goals. This type of reasoning allows combining linear multi-objective optimisation with logical constraints introduced by the system’s stakeholders. Finally, we illustrate the application of approach through a real-world case study from the e-government sector.

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.

The delivery of a framework in place for secure application development is of real value for application development teams to integrate security into their development life cycle, especially when a mobile or web application moves past the scanning stage and focuses increasingly on the remediation or mitigation phase based on static application security testing (SAST). For the first time, to the author’s knowledge, the industry-standard Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 vulnerabilities and CWE/SANS top 25 most dangerous software errors are synced up in a matrix with Checkmarx vulnerability queries, producing an application security framework that helps development teams review and address code vulnerabilities, minimise false positives discovered in static scans and penetration tests, targeting an increased accuracy of the findings. A case study is conducted for vulnerabilities scanning of a proof-of-concept mobile malware detection app. Mapping the OWASP/SANS with Checkmarx vulnerabilities queries, flaws and vulnerabilities are demonstrated to be mitigated with improved efficiency.

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.