This paper describes the design of secure connectors that are used in the design of secure software architectures for distributed business applications. Mixing security concerns with business concerns in software architectures makes applications more complex. With the goal of making secure software architectures more maintainable and evolvable, the secure connectors proposed in this paper are designed separately from business application components by considering different communication patterns between the components as well as security services required by application components. Each secure connector encapsulates security relevant objects to provide application components with security services. In this paper, secure connectors are applied to design the software architectures of electronic commerce and automated teller machine applications.

By careful separation of concerns, security requirements and design for security services can be modeled separately from application concerns. This modeling approach reduces system complexity caused by mixing security requirements and designs with application requirements and designs This separation of concerns is also needed in the implementation phase to consistently reduce system complexity. This paper addresses separation of application and security concerns in the implementation phase of secure software development. Security components separated from application components in the software architecture are implemented via security aspects with aspect-oriented programming, whereas application components are implemented through application objects with object-oriented programming. The mapping scheme of security components to security aspects is described in terms of security requirements. A security aspect is committed whenever application objects need the security aspect. A business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce system is used to validate the proposed approach using Java and AspectJ.