Modeling Security Risks at the System Design Stage: Alignment of Mal Activity Diagrams and SecureUML to the ISSRM Domain Model

Abstract

Security engineering is one of the important concerns during system development. It should be addressed throughout the whole system development process; however in many cases it is often dealt only during system development and maintenance. There are several security modeling languages (e.g, Misuse case, Secure Tropos) that help dealing with security risk management at the requirements stage. In this thesis, we are focusing on the modeling languages (e.g. Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML) that are used to design the system. More specifically we investigate how these languages support information systems security risks management (ISSRM). The outcome of this work is an alignment table between the Mal activity diagrams and SecureUML language constructs to the ISSRM domain model concepts. We ground our analysis and validate the received results on the number of illustrative examples. We hope that our results will help developers to understand how they can consider security risks at the system design stage. In addition we open the way for the interoperability between different modeling languages that are analysed using the same conceptual background, thus, potentially leading to the transformation between these modeling approaches.