SoSPa: A System of Security Design Patterns for Systematically Engineering Secure Systems

in Proceedings ACM/IEEE 18th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (2015, October)

Model-Driven Security (MDS) for secure systems development still has limitations to be more applicable in practice. A recent systematic review of MDS shows that current MDS approaches have not dealt with ... [more ▼]

Model-Driven Security (MDS) for secure systems development still has limitations to be more applicable in practice. A recent systematic review of MDS shows that current MDS approaches have not dealt with multiple security concerns systematically. Besides, catalogs of security patterns which can address multiple security concerns have not been applied efficiently. This paper presents an MDS approach based on a unified System of Security design Patterns (SoSPa). In SoSPa, security design patterns are collected, specified as reusable aspect models to form a coherent system of them that guides developers in systematically addressing multiple security concerns. SoSPa consists of not only interrelated security design patterns but also a refinement process towards their application. We applied SoSPa to design the security of crisis management systems. The result shows that multiple security concerns in the case study have been addressed by systematically integrating different security solutions. [less ▲]

An Extensive Systematic Review on the Model-Driven Development of Secure Systems

in Information and Software Technology (2015), 68(December 2015), 62-81

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large ... [more ▼]

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large number of publications. Objective: To provide a detailed analysis of the state of the art in MDS, a systematic literature review (SLR) is essential. Method: We conducted an extensive SLR on MDS. Derived from our research questions, we designed a rigorous, extensive search and selection process to identify a set of primary MDS studies that is as complete as possible. Our three-pronged search process consists of automatic searching, manual searching, and snowballing. After discovering and considering more than thousand relevant papers, we identified, strictly selected, and reviewed 108 MDS publications. Results: The results of our SLR show the overall status of the key artefacts of MDS, and the identified primary MDS studies. E.g. regarding security modelling artefact, we found that developing domain-specific languages plays a key role in many MDS approaches. The current limitations in each MDS artefact are pointed out and corresponding potential research directions are suggested. Moreover, we categorise the identified primary MDS studies into 5 significant MDS studies, and other emerging or less common MDS studies. Finally, some trend analyses of MDS research are given. Conclusion: Our results suggest the need for addressing multiple security concerns more systematically and simultaneously, for tool chains supporting the MDS development cycle, and for more empirical studies on the application of MDS methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, this SLR is the first in the field of Software Engineering that combines a snowballing strategy with database searching. This combination has delivered an extensive literature study on MDS. [less ▲]

An Extensive Systematic Review on Model-Driven Development of Secure Systems

Report (2015)

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large ... [more ▼]

Context: Model-Driven Security (MDS) is as a specialised Model-Driven Engineering research area for supporting the development of secure systems. Over a decade of research on MDS has resulted in a large number of publications. Objective: To provide a detailed analysis of the state of the art in MDS, a systematic literature review (SLR) is essential. Method: We conducted an extensive SLR on MDS. Derived from our research questions, we designed a rigorous, extensive search and selection process to identify a set of primary MDS studies that is as complete as possible. Our three-pronged search process consists of automatic searching, manual searching, and snowballing. After discovering and considering more than thousand relevant papers, we identified, strictly selected, and reviewed 108 MDS publications. Results: The results of our SLR show the overall status of the key artefacts of MDS, and the identified primary MDS studies. E.g. regarding security modelling artefact, we found that developing domain-specific languages plays a key role in many MDS approaches. The current limitations in each MDS artefact are pointed out and corresponding potential research directions are suggested. Moreover, we categorise the identified primary MDS studies into 5 principal MDS studies, and other emerging or less common MDS studies. Finally, some trend analyses of MDS research are given. Conclusion: Our results suggest the need for addressing multiple security concerns more systematically and simultaneously, for tool chains supporting the MDS development cycle, and for more empirical studies on the application of MDS methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, this SLR is the first in the field of Software Engineering that combines a snowballing strategy with database searching. This combination has delivered an extensive literature study on MDS. [less ▲]

Modeling, composing, and testing of security concerns in a Model-Driven Security approach

in Joosen, Wouter; Martinelli, Fabio; Heyman, Thomas (Eds.) Proceedings of the 2014 ESSoS Doctoral Symposium co-located with the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2014) (2014, February 26)

Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged as a promising sound methodology for supporting the development of secure systems nowadays. Following the advances in MDS, this research work aims at 1) developing ... [more ▼]

Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged as a promising sound methodology for supporting the development of secure systems nowadays. Following the advances in MDS, this research work aims at 1) developing new modeling techniques to represent multiple security concerns, 2) (automatically) composing security models with the business logic model (called target model), and 3) testing the security model composition and the resulting secure system against security requirements. These three objectives converge to an integrated MDS framework (and tool chain) which 1) allows a target system model to embed various security concerns, 2) enables the generation of implementation code including configured security infrastructures, and 3) makes these security properties testable by construction. This paper presents the main research modules, the results we have achieved so far, and the main points for future work. [less ▲]

Model-Driven Security with Modularity and Reusability for Secure Systems Development

in STAF-DS 2014 (2014)

Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged as a promising sound methodology for modern secure systems development. Following the advances in MDS, this paper describes the late-PhD work that has proposed a ... [more ▼]

Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged as a promising sound methodology for modern secure systems development. Following the advances in MDS, this paper describes the late-PhD work that has proposed a solution to better support secure systems development, and further strengthens MDS. Our MDS solution focuses on modularity and reusability in secure systems development. On one hand, we have pro- posed a modular approach for modularity and dynamic adaptation of flexibly secure systems. On the other hand, we have been working on MDS based on a library-like System of generic Security design Patterns in which security design patterns are collected, specified as reusable aspect models to form a coherent system of them that guides developers in systematically selecting the right security design patterns for the right job. Either way, security (design pattern) models can be automatically woven into the target system model. The woven secure system model can then be used for code generation, including configured security infrastructures. We have been also working on using model-based security testing techniques to validate the resulting secure systems. [less ▲]

A Systematic Review of Model-Driven Security

in The 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference Proceedings (2013, December)

To face continuously growing security threats and requirements, sound methodologies for constructing secure systems are required. In this context, Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged since more than a ... [more ▼]

To face continuously growing security threats and requirements, sound methodologies for constructing secure systems are required. In this context, Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged since more than a decade ago as a specialized Model-Driven Engineering approach for supporting the development of secure systems. MDS aims at improving the productivity of the development process and quality of the resulting secure systems, with models as the main artifact. This paper presents how we systematically examined existing published work in MDS and its results. The systematic review process, which is based on a formally designed review protocol, allowed us to identify, classify, and evaluate different MDS approaches. To be more specific, from thousands of relevant papers found, a final set of the most relevant MDS publications has been identified, strictly selected, and reviewed. We present a taxonomy for MDS, which is used to synthesize data in order to classify and evaluate the selected MDS approaches. The results draw a wide picture of existing MDS research showing the current status of the key aspects in MDS as well as the identified most relevant MDS approaches.We discuss the main limitations of the existing MDS approaches and suggest some potential research directions based on these insights. [less ▲]

Model-Driven Adaptive Delegation

in Masuhara, Hidehiko; Chiba, Sigeru; Ubayashi, Naoyasu (Eds.) Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference companion on Aspect-oriented software development (2013, March)

Model-Driven Security is a specialization of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that focuses on making security models productive, i.e., enforceable in the final deployment. Among the variety of models that ... [more ▼]

Model-Driven Security is a specialization of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that focuses on making security models productive, i.e., enforceable in the final deployment. Among the variety of models that have been studied in a MDE perspective, one can mention access control models that specify the access rights. So far, these models mainly focus on static definitions of access control policies, without taking into account the more complex, but essential, delegation of rights mechanism. User delegation is a meta-level mechanism for administrating access rights, which allows a user without any specific administrative privileges to delegate his/her access rights to another user. This paper analyses the main hard-points for introducing various delegation semantics in model-driven security and proposes a model-driven framework for 1) specifying access control, delegation and the business logic as separate concerns; 2) dynamically enforcing/weaving access control policies with various delegation features into security-critical systems; and 3) providing a flexibly dynamic adaptation strategy. We demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed solution through the proof-of-concept implementations of different systems. [less ▲]