Designing Security Requirements Models Through Planning

Abstract

Abstract. The quest for designing secure and trusted software has led to refined Software Engineering methodologies that rely on tools to support the design process. Automated reasoning mechanisms for requirements and software verification are by now a well-accepted part of the design process, and model driven architectures support the automation of the refinement process. We claim that we can further push the envelope towards the automatic exploration and selection among design alternatives and show that this is concretely possible for Secure Tropos, a requirements engineering methodology that addresses security and trust concerns. In Secure Tropos, a design consists of a network of actors (agents, positions or roles) with delegation/permission dependencies among them. Accordingly, the generation of design alternatives can be accomplished by a planner which is given as input a set of actors and goals and generates alternative multiagent plans to fulfill all given goals. We validate our claim with a case study using a state-of-the-art planner.

Identification and Verification of Security Relevant Functions in Embedded Systems Based on Source Code Annotations and Assertions

“…A model-based planning strategy for security requirements is described in [4]. A high-level model instead of source code is used to verify the formal properties of functional and security requirements.…”

Dynamic Web Service Composition

“…There are many services around the web and each one has a limited functionality. In many cases, a single web service is not sufficient to respond to the user's request and often services should be combined through a pattern of composition to achieve a specific goal [3,5,7,9,22,29]. Such a composition is carried out manually at present, which means that a user needs to execute all these services one by one and these tasks can be time and effort consuming.…”

“…As an example application, we consider the work by Hu, who has used the web service paradigm in an effort to make the communication between police departments and UK government agencies more effective [3,23,29]. Each of the providers (the agencies) offers data and enquiry capabilities to the police forces (a range of services are offered as shown in Figure 1).…”

“…Web service standards and technologies are composed of two major types of application interaction patterns on the basis of their database interaction access: Centralized Dataflow and Decentralized Dataflow. If our focus is towards dynamic service composition then in both approaches there are some limitations [3,8,9,11,17,19]. In Centralized Dataflow, data between component services is passed through the composite services and in that situation bottleneck problems occur, affecting throughput and response time.…”

Supporting Requirements Analysis in Tropos: A Planning-Based Approach

“…The idea of casting the problem of designing a set of delegations for a sociotechnical system into a planning one has already been presented in [4,3]. In addition, [3] proposes a preliminary approach to the evaluation of alternatives.…”