In the past 10 years, the research community has produced a significant number of design notations to represent security properties and concepts in a design artifact. These notations are aimed at documenting and analyzing security in a software design model. The fragmentation of the research space, however, has resulted in a complex tangle of different techniques. Hence, practitioners are confronted with the challenging task of scouting the right approach from a multitude of proposals. Similarly, it is hard for researchers to keep track of the synergies among the existing notations, in order to identify the existing opportunities for original contributions. This paper presents a systematic literature review that inventorizes the existing notations and provides an indepth, comparative analysis for each.

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Security decisions are an important part of software architecture design, and thus deserve to be explicitly represented in the design documentation. While UML is the best-known language for creating such documentation, it lacks security specific notations, which makes it difficult to represent the effect of the security decisions. Several security extensions for UML exist in the literature, but they represent security concerns at a lower level of abstraction, or only support a limited subset of security concerns. We propose a new notation, MASC, to model security concerns at the architectural level. It has been designed as an extension of UML, and is based on recurring security concepts that have been distilled from well-known security principles, goals, and patterns. By using our notation, a designer obtains a technique to express security concerns more explicitly in the architectural design documentation.

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