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Interdisciplinary communities involve people and knowledge from different disciplines in addressing a common challenge. Differing perspectives, processes, methods, tools, vocabularies, and standards are problems that arise in this context. We present an approach to support bringing together disciplines based on a common body of knowledge (CBK), in which knowledge from different disciplines is collected, integrated, and structured. The novelty of our approach is twofold: first, it introduces a CBK ontology, which allows one to semantically enrich contents in order to be able to query the CBK in a more elaborate way afterwards. Second, it heavily relies on user participation in building up a CBK, making use of the Semantic MediaWiki as a platform to support collaborative writing. The CBK ontology is backed by a conceptual framework, consisting of concepts to structure the knowledge, to provide access options to it, and to build up a common terminology. To ensure a high quality of the provided contents and to sustain the community’s commitment, we further present organizational means as part of our approach. We demonstrate our work using the example of a Network of Excellence EU project, which aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from services computing, security and software engineering.
This paper presents a conceptual framework for security engineering, with a strong focus on security requirements elicitation and analysis. This conceptual framework establishes a clear-cut vocabulary and makes explicit the interrelations between the different concepts and notions used in security engineering. Further, we apply our conceptual framework to compare and evaluate current security requirements engineering approaches, such as the Common Criteria, Secure Tropos, SREP, MSRA, as well as methods based on UML and problem frames. We review these methods and assess them according to different criteria, such as the general approach and scope of the method, its validation, and quality assurance capabilities. Finally, we discuss how these methods are related to the conceptual framework and to one another.
We present a threat and risk-driven methodology to security requirements engineering. Our approach has a strong focus on gathering, modeling, and analyzing the environment in which a secure ICT-system to be built is located. The knowledge about the environment comprises threat and risk models. This security-relevant knowledge is used to assess the adequacy of security mechanisms, which are selected to establish security requirements.
We present a process to develop secure software with an extensive pattern-based security requirements engineering phase. It supports identifying and analyzing conflicts between different security requirements. In the design phase, we proceed by selecting security software components that achieve security requirements. The process enables software developers to systematically identify, analyze, and finally realize security requirements using security software components. We illustrate our approach by a lawyer agency software example.
Problem frames are patterns for analyzing, structuring, and characterizing software development problems. This paper presents a formal metamodel for problem frames expressed in UML class diagrams and using the formal specification notation OCL. That metamodel clarifies the nature of the different syntactical elements of problem frames, as well as the relations between them. It provides a framework for syntactical analysis and semantic validation of newly defined problem frames, and it prepares the ground for tool support for the problem frame approach.
We present a pattern system/or security requirements engineering, consisting of security problem frames and concretized security problem frames. These are special kinds of problem frames that serve to structure, characterize, analyze, and finally solve software development problems in the area of software and system security. We equip each frame with formal preconditions and postconditions. The analysis of these conditions results in a pattern system that explicitly shows the dependencies between the different frames. Moreover, we indicate related frames, which are commonly used together with the considered frame. Hence, our approach helps security engineers to avoid omissions and to cover all security requirements that are relevant for a given problem.
Forums such as Stack Overflow are used by many software developers to find a solution for a given coding problem. Found solutions, i.e. forum posts containing relevant source code, are utilized in a copy and paste manner. This behavior carries the risk that vulnerabilities contained in the source code of the forum posts are spread. Software developers should be able to identify vulnerable source code at an early stage, thereby preventing copying the corresponding source code. In this paper, we introduce the tool CopypastaVulGuard that identifies vulnerable source code in forum posts and allows software developers to omit the source code by marking the forum posts as dangerous. Our tool consists of a browser extension and a management application capable to address as examples SQL injections, remote code executions and deprecated functions based on a dump of the archive.org Stack Overflow data set. We present an evaluation of our tool's possible impact and relevance considering pros/cons and selected research questions.