Revision of Security Risk-oriented Patterns for Distributed Systems

Name
Silver Samarütel
Abstract
Security risk management is an important part of software development. Given that majority of modern organizations rely heavily on information systems, security plays a big part in ensuring smooth operation of business processes. Many people rely on e-services offered by banks and medical establishments. Inadequate security measures in information systems could have unwanted effects on an organization’s reputation and on people’s lives. Security concerns usually need to be addressed throughout the development and lifetime of a software system. Literature reports however, that security is often considered during implementation and maintenance stages of software development. Since security risk mitigation usually results with changes to an IS’s specification, security analysis is best done at an early phase of the development process. This allows an early exclusion of inadequate system designs. Additionally, it helps prevent the need for fundamental and expensive design changes later in the development process. In this thesis, we target the secure system development problem by suggesting application of security risk-oriented patterns. These patterns help find security risk occurrences in business processes and present mitigations for these risks. They provide business analysts with means to elicit and introduce security requirements to business processes. At the same time, they reduce the efforts needed for risk analysis. We confront the security risk-oriented patterns against threat patterns for distributed systems. This allows us to refine the collection of existing patterns and introduce additional patterns to mitigate security risks in processes of distributed systems. The applicability of these security risk-oriented patterns is validated on business processes from aviation turnaround system. The validation results show that the security risk-oriented patterns can be used to mitigate security risks in distributed systems.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Master - Software Engineering
Supervisor(s)
Raimundas Matulevičius
Defence year
2016
 
PDF