A Guided Modeling Approach for Secure System Design

IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C), vol. 66, pp. 105–110

Abstract

Designing security architectures (SA) that are maintained independently from the overall architecture is a well-researched and established approach for modeling the security perspective of software systems. However, this approach involves several drawbacks in the documentation of SAs. These include an increase in redundancies in the design documents, synchronization errors due to concurrent modification of separate models, and expert knowledge required to design SAs, which is a crucial constraint due to the lack of experts in the security domain. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents the foundations, vision, research plan, and preliminary results of a novel architecture modeling approach that aims to eliminate the necessity of designing separate SAs and support architects in modeling secure software systems. The approach establishes a guided process for tracing security requirements to the modeling elements in the architecture description. Additionally, it utilizes security properties to make design recommendations in the modeling process and separate the security-related parts of an architecture description from its other parts.

Authors 1

1. Alex R. Sabau corresponding Aachen Research Group Software Construction

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Research Group Software Construction, RWTH Aachen University,Aachen,Germany