Checking security compliance between models and code

Abstract

It is challenging to verify that the planned security mechanisms are actually implemented in the software. In the context of model-based development, the implemented security mechanisms must capture all intended security properties that were considered in the design models. Assuring this compliance manually is labor intensive and can be error-prone. This work introduces the first semi-automatic technique for secure data flow compliance checks between design models and code. We develop heuristic-based automated mappings between a design-level model (SecDFD, provided by humans) and a code-level representation (Program Model, automatically extracted from the implementation) in order to guide users in discovering compliance violations, and hence, potential security flaws in the code. These mappings enable an automated, and project-specific static analysis of the implementation with respect to the desired security properties of the design model. We developed two types of security compliance checks and evaluated the entire approach on open source Java projects.

A Refactoring for Data Minimisation Using Formal Verification

“…Work by Töberg et al [26] as well as Tuma et al [25] is similar to Quac in that it combines architecture and code by using sourcecode analyses to verify whether assumptions in an architectural model hold in the implementation. However, these approaches do not modify the architectural model based on the results of the source-code analysis.…”