Towards safe and productive development of secure software

Abstract

Cost effective development of secure software is a key goal for many software organizations as they seek to manage the risks of misbehaving software. Employing Formal Methods (FMs) in the Model-Based Software Engineering (MBSE) paradigm that systematically produces software systems through modeling, simulation, reuse and automation provides a reasonable approach for developing highly secure software in a productive manner. MBSE approaches introduce some complexities at the beginning of the lifecycle, but save substantial time in production and delivery by identifying and resolving defects/errors early and reducing rework. On the other hand, the expertise needed for FMs and the concomitant costs often inhibit their wide employment in securing large and complex software systems. In this paper, we report our experience with Formal Analysis and Design for Engineering Security (FADES) an approach we introduced two years ago at this venue. Through systematic and automated transformation from semiformal requirements specifications to formal design, FADES facilitates embedding FMs into the development lifecycle of secure software systems. We outline the case studies and validation of FADES feasibility for the design and implementation of secure software systems. Promising experience with FADES was a necessary precursor to our work on generalizing FADES and our proposal to direct FADES toward being an MBSE approach. We discuss how the formality, transformation, reuse and automation in FADES may further enhance the MBSE-based production and delivery of secure software.

Model‐driven engineering of safety and security software systems: A systematic mapping study and future research directions

“…Only a few studies (7 out of 143) covered the whole MDE spectrum, i.e., all development stages. Hassan et al 15 were discussing the idea of how the Formal Analysis and Design for Engineering Security (FADES) approach can be used to support the model‐based software engineering (MBSE) paradigm. Bloomfield et al 16 use the structured safety cases approach to discuss the impact that security might have on an existing safety case.…”

“…Twelve out of 143 studies presented a language for the MDE of safety and security systems. The proposed languages were either formal languages, 15 , 21 , 38 , 96 , 115 graphical modeling languages, 17 , 31 , 39 , 70 programming languages, 125 architecture description language, 106 or a language for presenting mishaps. 156 …”

“…Another interesting observation we made was that most researchers are extending the capabilities of existing methods and tools to solve the challenges of this field (e.g., FMVEA is based on well‐established FMEA or STPA‐SafeSec is based on popular STPA) rather than presenting new frameworks and languages. Of course, new pertinent frameworks (e.g., SAFESCALE 75 ) or languages (e.g., FADES 15 ) are also surfacing but relatively low in number. A few contributions were made in laying out the basic theoretic foundations of the field, including aligning methods for safety and security.…”

“…Twelve out of 143 studies presented a language for the MDE of safety and security systems. The proposed languages were either formal languages, 15,21,38,96,115 graphical modeling languages, 17,31,39,70 programming languages, 125 architecture description language, 106 or a language for presenting mishaps. 156 Some researchers also presented some decision support systems, 76,77,108,122,123 patterns, 50,85,100,105,119 and policies 29,54,80 for the MDE of safe and secure software systems.…”