Model Based Process to Support Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering

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.

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.

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.

ESPRE brings together international researchers and practitioners with a common interest towards evolving security and privacy requirements. The workshop probes the interfaces between Security, Privacy, and Requirements Engineering, exploring innovative approaches enhancing the practice of Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering, whilst accounting for the ever-changing needs of consumers and organisations.

Adoption of the most suitable requirements engineering (RE) process and selection of the most appropriate RE techniques for a given project are challenging issues for industry. In order to alleviate the problems, a framework for RE process development (FRERE) was developed based on our research in the last six years. The overall architecture of the framework and a brief case study are presented in the paper. The framework addresses several core issues of the RE process: engineering issues, domain issues, characteristics of the software project, and issues of conformity to software process standards. FRERE consists of three parts: (1) The RE process knowledge base (REPKB) which contains RE process knowledge, (2) methodologies which provide guidance to develop a customized software process model in an iterative way; and (3) assessment models which provide information about the suitability of the newly developed RE process model for the software project under development.

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.

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.

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

Modeling Security and Privacy Requirements: a Use Case-Driven Approach

[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

Software’s security depends greatly on how a system was designed, so it’s very important to capture security requirements at the requirements engineering phase. Previous research proposes different approaches, but each is looking at the same problem from a different perspective such as the user, the threat, or the goal perspective. This creates huge gaps between them in terms of the used terminology and the steps followed to obtain security requirements. This research aims to define an approach as comprehensive as possible, incorporating the strengths and best practices found in existing approaches, and filling the gaps between them. To achieve that, relevant literature reviews were studied and primary approaches were compared to find their common and divergent traits. To guarantee comprehensiveness, a documented comparison process was followed. The outline of our approach was derived from this comparison. As a result, it reconciles different perspectives to security requirements engineering by including: the identification of stakeholders, assets and goals, and tracing them later to the elicited requirements, performing risk assessment in conformity with standards and performing requirements validation. It also includes the use of modeling artifacts to describe threats, risks or requirements, and defines a common terminology.

Requirements engineering (RE) process improvement methods typically work with explicit process models describing activities and document flow between the stakeholders involved, and with explicit document definitions. In complex, multi-project contexts, however, the RE process is better characterized as intertwining of design, negotiation, and sense-making. In the first part of This work, we present the concepts of a workshop-based RE process improvement technique suitable for a multi-project context. In the second part, we show the experiences made in an industrial case study conducted with Nokia smart traffic products. The major innovations of our approach are: (i) instead of a process model, an information model is created, which focuses solely on the responsibilities of stakeholders with regard to the major documents; (ii) instead of document details, only the major point of view of the documents is defined.

This paper identifies the essential components of a requirements engineering (RE) process and provides alternatives to the requirements analyst when deciding on a particular set of RE methods. Existing methods of choosing RE techniques are discussed, and a new technique is proposed specifically for choosing RE techniques for projects with critical time-to-market projects. The components of the essential RE process as well as many other insights into the practice of RE were identified by examining the current literature and by analyzing the data from 25 completed surveys concerning the area of RE. The survey data provides insight into the state of the practice in requirements engineering.

Large amount of security faults existing in software systems could be complex and hard to identify during the fault analysis. Therefore, it is not always possible to fully mitigate the internal or external security faults (vulnerabilities or threats) within the system. On the other hand, existence of faults in the system may eventually lead to a security failure. To avoid security failure of the target system it is required to make the system flexible and tolerant in the presence of security faults. This paper proposes a goal-based modeling approach to develop security requirements of Security-Critical Systems (SCSs) through explicitly factoring the faults into the requirement engineering process. Our approach establishes the Security Requirement Model (SRM) of the system based on its respective Security Fault Model (SFM). We incorporate fault tolerance into the SRM through considering the partial satisfaction of security goals. The proposed approach factors this partiality into the goals by using proper mitigation techniques during the refinement process. This approach eventually contributes to a fault tolerant model for security requirements of the target system.

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.