Eduardo Fernández-Medina

An analysis of security issues for cloud computing

Cloud Computing is a flexible, cost-effective, and proven delivery platform for providing business or consumer IT services over the Internet. However, cloud Computing presents an added level of risk because essential services are often outsourced to a third party, which makes it harder to maintain data security and privacy, support data and service availability, and demonstrate compliance. Cloud Computing leverages many technologies (SOA, virtualization, Web 2.0); it also inherits their security issues, which we discuss here, identifying the main vulnerabilities in this kind of systems and the most important threats found in the literature related to Cloud Computing and its environment as well as to identify and relate vulnerabilities and threats with possible solutions.

A BPMN Extension for the Modeling of Security Requirements in Business Processes

Business Processes are considered a crucial issue by many enterprises because they are the key to maintain competitiveness. Moreover, business processes are important for software developers, since they can capture from them the necessary requirements for software design and creation. Besides, business process modeling is the center for conducting and improving how the business is operated. Security is important for business performance, but traditionally, it is considered after the business processes definition. Empirical studies show that, at the business process level, customers, end users, and business analysts are able to express their security needs. In this work, we will present a proposal aimed at integrating security requirements through business process modeling. We will summarize our Business Process Modeling Notation extension for modeling secure business process through Business Process Diagrams, and we will apply this approach to a typical health-care business process.

A common criteria based security requirements engineering process for the development of secure information systems

In order to develop security critical Information Systems, specifying security quality requirements is vitally important, although it is a very difficult task. Fortunately, there are several security standards, like the Common Criteria (ISO/IEC 15408), which help us handle security requirements. This article will present a Common Criteria centred and reuse-based process that deals with security requirements at the early stages of software development in a systematic and intuitive way, by providing a security resources repository as well as integrating the Common Criteria into the software lifecycle, so that it unifies the concepts of requirements engineering and security engineering.

A systematic review of security requirements engineering

One of the most important aspects in the achievement of secure software systems in the software development process is what is known as Security Requirements Engineering. However, very few reviews focus on this theme in a systematic, thorough and unbiased manner, that is, none of them perform a systematic review of security requirements engineering, and there is not, therefore, a sufficiently good context in which to operate. In this paper we carry out a systematic review of the existing literature concerning security requirements engineering in order to summarize the evidence regarding this issue and to provide a framework/background in which to appropriately position new research activities.

A Systematic Review and Comparison of Security Ontologies

The use of ontologies for representing knowledge provides us with organization, communication and reusability. Information security is a serious requirement which must be carefully considered. Concepts and relations managed by any scientific community need to be formally defined and ontological engineering supports their definition. In this paper, the method of systematic review is applied with the purpose of identifying, extracting and analyzing the main proposals for security ontologies. The main identified proposals are compared using a formal framework and we conclude by stating their early state of development and the need of additional research efforts.

Towards CIM to PIM transformation: from secure business processes defined in BPMN to use-cases

The software community is currently paying attention to modeltransformation. The MDA approach is particularly orientated towards solvingthe problems of time, cost and quality associated with software creation.Enterprises are, moreover, aware of the importance that business processes andsecurity have in relation to their competitive position and performance. In ourprevious work, we have proposed a BPMN extension which can be used todefine security requirement in business process specifications. A SecureBusiness Process description is that of computation independent models in anMDA context. In this paper we propose a CIM to PIM transformationcomposed of QVT rules. Various UML use cases, which will be part of aninformation system, are obtained from the secure business process description.

Semi-formal transformation of secure business processes into analysis class and use case models: An MDA approach

Context: Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an alternative approach for information systems development. The basic underlying concept of this approach is the definition of abstract models that can be transformed to obtain models near implementation. One fairly widespread proposal in this sphere is that of Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Business process models are abstract models which additionally contain key information about the tasks that are being carried out to achieve the companys goals, and two notations currently exist for modelling business processes: the Unified Modelling Language (UML), through activity diagrams, and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Objective: Our research is particularly focused on security requirements, in such a way that security is modelled along with the other aspects that are included in a business process. To this end, in earlier works we have defined a metamodel called secure business process (SBP), which may assist in the process of developing software as a source of highly valuable requirements (including very abstract security requirements), which are transformed into models with a lower abstraction level, such as analysis class diagrams and use case diagrams through the approach presented in this paper. Method: We have defined all the transformation rules necessary to obtain analysis class diagrams and use case diagrams from SBP, and refined them through the characteristic iterative process of the action-research method. Results: We have obtained a set of rules and a checklist that make it possible to automatically obtain a set of UML analysis classes and use cases, starting from SBP models. Our approach has additionally been applied in a real environment in the area of the payment of electrical energy consumption. Conclusions: The application of our proposal shows that our semi-automatic process can be used to obtain a set of useful artifacts for software development processes.

Secure information systems development - a survey and comparison

Nowadays, security solutions are mainly focused on providing security defences (such as firewalls, routers, configuration server, password and encryption) instead of solving one of the main reasons of security problems that refers to an appropriate information systems design. Fortunately, there have been developed new methodologies incorporating security into their development processes. This paper makes a comparison of eleven secure systems design methodologies. The analysed methodologies fulfil criteria partially and in this paper, we make it clear that security aspects cannot be completely specified by these methodologies since they have a series of limitations that we have to take into account. At the same time, each one of these methodologies comprises very important aspects concerning security that can be used as a basis for new methodologies or extensions that may be developed.

Designing secure databases

Security is an important issue that must be considered as a fundamental requirement in information systems development, and particularly in database design. Therefore security, as a further quality property of software, must be tackled at all stages of the development. The most extended secure database model is the multilevel model, which permits the classification of information according to its confidentiality, and considers mandatory access control. Nevertheless, the problem is that no database design methodologies that consider security (and therefore secure database models) across the entire life cycle, particularly at the earliest stages currently exist. Therefore it is not possible to design secure databases appropriately. Our aim is to solve this problem by proposing a methodology for the design of secure databases. In addition to this methodology, we have defined some models that allow us to include security information in the database model, and a constraint language to define security constraints. As a result, we can specify a fine-grained classification of the information, defining with a high degree of accuracy which properties each user has to own in order to be able to access each piece of information. The methodology consists of four stages: requirements gathering; database analysis; multilevel relational logical design; and specific logical design. The first three stages define activities to analyze and design a secure database, thus producing a general secure database model. The last stage is made up of activities that adapt the general secure data model to one of the most popular secure database management systems: Oracle9i Label Security. This methodology has been used in a genuine case by the Data Processing Center of Provincial Government. In order to support the methodology, we have implemented an extension of Rational Rose, including and managing security information and constraints in the first stages of the methodology.

Editorial: Model-Driven Development for secure information systems

Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been proposed as a means to support the software development process through the use of a model-centric approach. Models help us to understand a complex problem and its potential solutions through abstraction. Software systems can, therefore, benefit from MDD for their development, thus improving productivity, quality, and platform independence. MDD can be used to develop high-level (platform independent) models which can be transformed into more specific (according to specific platforms) models which can in turn be transformed into code dependent models. This successive model transformation provides a basis for mapping between analysis and design models, and for its traceability. The Software Engineering community is beginning to realize that security is an important requirement for software systems, and that it should be considered from the first stages of its development, owing to the fact that its ad hoc integration into a software system which has already been developed has a negative impact on the maintainability and security of the system. Unfortunately, current approaches which take security into consideration from the early stages of software development do not take advantage of MDD. Security should definitely be integrated as a further element of the high-level software system models undergoing transformation until the final code generation, as occurs with the models’ other components. This special issue explores current research challenges, ideas and approaches for employing Model-Driven Development to integrate security into software systems development through an engineering-based approach, avoiding the traditional ad hoc security integration. We have selected eight high-quality papers which are aligned with this idea. The chosen papers represent an interesting sample which shows how security can be modeled and integrated into the software development, thus offering better software solutions. In order to make the papers in this special issue more accessible to readers who may not be familiar with this area of research, we have provided an introduction which reviews some of the most highly related research, citing some of the most up-to-date and relevant articles. This introduction is organized as follows. First, the Model-Driven Development is introduced, describing its basis and its applications. We then present an overview of how the Model-Driven Development can be applied to the development of secure information systems. Finally, we conclude with a brief summary of the articles published in this special issue, and with our acknowledgements to all the professionals who have contributed towards its success.