Shareeful Islam

Eliciting security requirements and tracing them to design: an integration of Common Criteria, heuristics, and UMLsec

Building secure systems is difficult for many reasons. This paper deals with two of the main challenges: (i) the lack of security expertise in development teams and (ii) the inadequacy of existing methodologies to support developers who are not security experts. The security standard ISO 14508 Common Criteria (CC) together with secure design techniques such as UMLsec can provide the security expertise, knowledge, and guidelines that are needed. However, security expertise and guidelines are not stated explicitly in the CC. They are rather phrased in security domain terminology and difficult to understand for developers. This means that some general security and secure design expertise are required to fully take advantage of the CC and UMLsec. In addition, there is the problem of tracing security requirements and objectives into solution design, which is needed for proof of requirements fulfilment. This paper describes a security requirements engineering methodology called SecReq. SecReq combines three techniques: the CC, the heuristic requirements editor HeRA, and UMLsec. SecReq makes systematic use of the security engineering knowledge contained in the CC and UMLsec, as well as security-related heuristics in the HeRA tool. The integrated SecReq method supports early detection of security-related issues (HeRA), their systematic refinement guided by the CC, and the ability to trace security requirements into UML design models. A feedback loop helps reusing experience within SecReq and turns the approach into an iterative process for the secure system life-cycle, also in the presence of system evolution.

A framework to support alignment of secure software engineering with legal regulations

Regulation compliance is getting more and more important for software systems that process and manage sensitive information. Therefore, identifying and analysing relevant legal regulations and aligning them with security requirements become necessary for the effective development of secure software systems. Nevertheless, Secure Software Engineering Modelling Languages (SSEML) use different concepts and terminology from those used in the legal domain for the description of legal regulations. This situation, together with the lack of appropriate background and knowledge of laws and regulations, introduces a challenge for software developers. In particular, it makes difficult to perform (i) the elicitation of appropriate security requirements from the relevant laws and regulations; and (ii) the correct tracing of the security requirements throughout the development stages. This paper presents a framework to support the consideration of laws and regulations during the development of secure software systems. In particular, the framework enables software developers (i) to correctly elicit security requirements from the appropriate laws and regulations; and (ii) to trace these requirements throughout the development stages in order to ensure that the design indeed supports the required laws and regulations. Our framework is based on existing work from the area of secure software engineering, and it complements this work with a novel and structured process and a well-defined method. A practical case study is employed to demonstrate the applicability of our work.

Enhancing security requirements engineering by organizational learning

More and more software projects today are security-related in one way or the other. Requirements engineers without expertise in security are at risk of overlooking security requirements, which often leads to security vulnerabilities that can later be exploited in practice. Identifying security-relevant requirements is labor-intensive and error-prone. In order to facilitate the security requirements elicitation process, we present an approach supporting organizational learning on security requirements by establishing company-wide experience resources and a socio-technical network to benefit from them. The approach is based on modeling the flow of requirements and related experiences. Based on those models, we enable people to exchange experiences about security-relevant requirements while they write and discuss project requirements. At the same time, the approach enables participating stakeholders to learn while they write requirements. This can increase security awareness and facilitate learning on both individual and organizational levels. As a basis for our approach, we introduce heuristic assistant tools. They support reuse of existing experiences that are relevant for security. In particular, they include Bayesian classifiers that issue a warning automatically when new requirements seem to be security-relevant. Our results indicate that this is feasible, in particular if the classifier is trained with domain-specific data and documents from previous projects. We show how the ability to identify security-relevant requirements can be improved using this approach. We illustrate our approach by providing a step-by-step example of how we improved the security requirements engineering process at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and report on experiences made in this application.

Integrating risk management activities into requirements engineering

Software projects are often faced with unanticipated problems caused by e.g. changes in the development environment resulting in delays or threatening the ability of the project to succeed. Managing these uncertainties is a challenging task at all phases of the development, but nevertheless crucial in controlling schedule and costs. Therefore software development risks need to be controlled as early as possible. As software development risks are not merely of technical nature it is equally important to tackle non-technical risks. The paper presents a goal-driven software development risk management model (GSRM) that takes a holistic view on development, taking both technical and non-technical development components into consideration. The focus of the paper is on how to integrate GSRM and particularly the holistic risk perspective into requirements engineering. GSRM effectively identifies and makes explicit the critical project goals (for arriving at a successful project) and the risk factors that may obstruct these goals. GSRM also helps in planning how to employ control actions for mitigating risks and by that increase the ability to meet project goals. The integrated requirements engineering risk management model has been applied to an on-going development project in a low-cost development environment (Bangladesh). The result showed it to be relatively trivial to integrate the model into requirements engineering activities and that the model did indeed contribute to the overall project success.

Software development risk management model: a goal driven approach

Software development project is often faced with unanticipated problems which pose any potential risks within the development environment. Controlling these risks arises from both the technical and non-technical development components already from the early stages of the development is crucial to arrive at a successful project. Therefore, software development risk management is becoming recognized as a best practice in the software industry for reducing these risks before they occur. This thesis contributes for a goal-driven software development risk management model to assess and manage software development risk within requirement engineering phase.

Towards a Framework to Elicit and Manage Security and Privacy Requirements from Laws and Regulations

[Context and motivation] The increasing demand of software systems to process and manage sensitive information has led to the need that software systems should comply with relevant laws and regulations, which enforce the privacy and other aspects of the stored information. [Question/problem] However, the task is challenging because concepts and terminology used for requirements engineering are mostly different to those used in the legal domain and there is a lack of appropriate modelling languages and techniques to support such activities. [Principal ideas/results] The legislation need to be analysed and align with the system requirements. [Contribution] This paper motivates the need to introduce a framework to assist the elicitation and management of security and privacy requirements from relevant legislation and it briefly presents the foundations of such a framework along with an example.

Goal and Risk Factors in Offshore Outsourced Software Development from Vendor's Viewpoint

Reducing production cost is vital for ensuring sustainable competitive strength. This is particularly true in software development, in which there has been a move from in-house development to global and now also to offshore-outsourced software development. In offshore outsourcing, development activities are most often moved to low-cost development environments that are locally managed. However, this type of outsourcing is not without problems. Most development projects are complex, and moving control and responsibility away from the client increase complexity. But, there is a trade-off between cost and complexity and control, as well as an increased chance of failure of the project. This paper contributes to identify the goals from the early development components and risk factors threatening the goals to fulfill. A goal-driven software development risk management modeling (GSRM) propose to supports this task. We conducted a study based on Delphi survey process to obtain the goals and the risk factors in a different cultural environment for the offshore vendors in Bangladesh.

Evaluating cloud deployment scenarios based on security and privacy requirements

Migrating organisational services, data and application on the Cloud is an important strategic decision for organisations due to the large number of benefits introduced by the usage of cloud computing, such as cost reduction and on-demand resources. Despite, however, many benefits, there are challenges and risks for cloud adaption related to (amongst others) data leakage, insecure APIs and shared technology vulnerabilities. These challenges need to be understood and analysed in the context of an organisation’s security and privacy goals and relevant cloud computing deployment models. Although the literature provides a large number of references to works that consider cloud computing security issues, no work has been provided, to our knowledge, which supports the elicitation of security and privacy requirements and the selection of an appropriate cloud deployment model based on such requirements. This work contributes towards this gap. In particular, we propose a requirements engineering framework to support the elicitation of security and privacy requirements and the selection of an appropriate deployment model based on the elicited requirements. Our framework provides a modelling language that builds on concepts from requirements, security, privacy and cloud engineering, and a systematic process. We use a real case study, based on the Greek National Gazette, to demonstrate the applicability of our work.

An empirical study on the implementation and evaluation of a goal-driven software development risk management model

Context: Building a quality software product in the shortest possible time to satisfy the global market demand gives an enterprise a competitive advantage. However, uncertainties and risks exist at every stage of a software development project. These can have an extremely high influence on the success of the final software product. Early risk management practice is effective to manage such risks and contributes effectively towards the project success. Objective: Despite risk management approaches, a detailed guideline that explains where to integrate risk management activities into the project is still missing. Little effort has been directed towards the evaluation of the overall impact of a risk management method. We present a Goal-driven Software Development Risk Management Model (GSRM) and its explicit integration into the requirements engineering phase and an empirical investigation result of applying GSRM into a project. Method: We combine the case study method with action research so that the results from the case study directly contribute to manage the studied project risks and to identify ways to improve the proposed methodology. The data is collected from multiple sources and analysed both in a qualitative and quantitative way. Results: When risk factors are beyond the control of the project manager and project environment, it is difficult to control these risks. The project scope affects all the dimensions of risk. GSRM is a reasonable risk management method that can be employed in an industrial context. The study results have been compared against other study results in order to generalise findings and identify contextual factors. Conclusion: A formal early stage risk management practice provides early warning related to the problems that exists in a project, and it contributes to the overall project success. It is not necessary to always consider budget and schedule constraints as top priority. There exist issues such as requirements, change management, and user satisfaction which can influence these constraints.

Data confidentiality using fragmentation in cloud computing

Purpose – The aim of this research is to secure the sensitive outsourced data with minimum encryption within the cloud provider. Unfaithful solutions for providing privacy and security along with performance issues by encryption usage of outsourced data are the main motivation points of this research.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a method for secure and confidential storage of data in the cloud environment based on fragmentation. The method supports minimal encryption to minimize the computations overhead due to encryption. The proposed method uses normalization of relational databases, tables are categorized based on user requirements relating to performance, availability and serviceability, and exported to XML as fragments. After defining the fragments and assigning the appropriate confidentiality levels, the lowest number of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) is used required to store all fragments that must remain unlinkable in separate locations.Findings – Particularly in the cloud da...