Alignment of Misuse Cases to ISSRM
Name
Inam Soomro
Abstract
As a line between digital and social life is diminishing, security concerns of information systems and information per se, also developing and maintaining system security are gaining a rising attention. Nevertheless, the existing practices report on numerous cases when security aspects were considered only at the end of the system development process, thus, missing the systematic security analysis during system and software requirements and design stages.
Misuse case diagrams are one of the possible ways to relate security analysis and system functional requirements definition. Their main goal is to model negative scenarios with respect to the defined system functional requirement elicitation and analysis. Despite this fundamental advantage, misuse cases tend to be rather imprecise; they do not comply with security risk management strategies, and, thus, could lead to misinterpretation of the security-related concepts. Such limitations could potentially result in poor security solutions. Quite often, the organizations have to adopt their own security solutions to safeguard their resources and assets.
In this thesis we will apply a systematic approach to understand how misuse case diagrams could help model organisational assets, potential system risks, and security requirements to mitigate these risks. More specifically we will align misuse case constructs with the concepts of the domain model for the information systems security risk management (ISSRM). In addition, based on such an ISSRM and language alignment we will investigate and develop rules to translate misuse case diagrams to the Secure Tropos model.
The contribution of this research has several benefits. Firstly, it will potentially help understand how misuse case could deal with security risk management. Secondly, it will define method to support reasoning for the security requirements introduction and implementation in the developed system. Finally the transformation to the Secure Tropos would potentially help developers (and other system stakeholders) to understand why security solutions are important and what different stakeholder trade-offs are.
We plan to validate our results where the quality model regarding its comprehensibility will be measured for the misuse case diagrams.
We believe that such alignment of the misuse cases with ISSRM and misuse case diagram transformation to the goal-oriented modelling language will be beneficial to system and software developers. Firstly, it will allow understanding security concerns at the earlier stages of development. Secondly it will help to view security problems from different angles, understanding different security development perspectives.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Software Engineering
Supervisor(s)
Dr. Raimundas Matulevicius
Defence year
2012