No abstract

The standardization of network protocols and software components in embedded systems development has introduced security threats that have been common before in e-commerce and office systems into the domain of critical infrastructures. The ESSAF framework presented in this paper lays the ground for collaborative, structured security assessments during the design and development phase of these systems. Its three phases system modeling, security modeling and mitigation planning guide software developers in the independent assessment of their product's security, minimizing the burden on security experts in the collection of security relevant data.

Devices that are designed for the use in critical infrastructures demand a high level of security. Therefore, a consideration of cyber threats and security mechanisms should be done in an early state, at best at the product's design phase. In this paper, we present a security assessment method in addition to a support tool that allows the involved participants to conduct security assessments in a reproducible and standardized way. Special for our method is the focus on the collaboration of different domain experts at various abstraction levels, which is typical for critical infrastructure device assessments.