Author:
Dianxiang Xu
Affiliation:
North Dakota State University, United States
Keyword(s):
Software architecture, Security, Threat model, Use case, Misuse case, UML.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Business Process Management
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Modeling Concepts and Information Integration Tools
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
To deal with software security issues in the early stages of system development, this paper presents a threat-driven approach to the architectural design and analysis of secure information systems. In this approach, we model security threats to systems with misuse cases and mitigation requirements with mitigation use cases at the requirements analysis phase. Then we drive system architecture design (including the identification of architectural components and their connections) by use cases, misuse cases, and mitigation use cases. According to the misuse case-based threat model, we analyze whether or not a candidate architecture is resistant to the identified security threats and what constraints must be imposed on the choices of system implementation. This provides a smooth transition from requirements specification to high-level design and greatly improves the traceability of security concerns in high assurance information systems. We demonstrate our approach through a case study o
n a security-intensive payroll information system.
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