Formal derivation of security design specifications from security requirements

Abstract

Engineering secure software remains a significant challenge for today's software organizations as they struggle to understand the implications of security o the system and develop systems that guarantee specified software security properties. Despite many software engineering advances, current methods for deriving a design from a set of requirements that guarantee the retention of the intended security properties remains difficult and often unachievable. If security requirements are formalized and transformed into design using formal methods, the result would reduce the potential for security vulnerabilities through better clarity, completeness, and consistency. To this end, we outline a requirements-driven security engineering approach for deriving design specifications from security requirements that guarantee security properties specified in requirements are retained. We build on the goal-oriented KAOS (Knowledge Acquisition in autOmated Specifications) framework to formally construct a complete, consistent, and clear security requirements model. The resulting model is then transformed to the B language to derive security design specifications. Using B enables us to further implement the design while preserving requirements relevant security properties. Using the B refinement mechanism, we generate design specifications and ultimately implementation. The approach treats security-specific elements in a systematic and constructive way while considering security early in the development lifecycle with assurance of completeness, consistency and clarity throughout the development. Moreover, our approach allows for requirement traceability at the various phases of development that helps security evaluators to have more confidence in the target of evaluation. General TermsDesign, security, and verification KeywordsGoal-oriented security requirements engineering, formal methods, design specifications, threat models, attack analysis

A review on security requirements specification by formal methods

“…• Hassan et al 31 proposed a novel approach for design specification from the security requirement by integrating the KAOS method and B-Method.…”

“…Goal-oriented approach KAOS 31 KAOS method is based on first-order logic temporal logic that formally constructs a complete, consistent, and clear security requirement model. In this method, security requirements are set as a goal to be achieved by the systems.…”

Desiree - a Refinement Calculus for Requirements Engineering

“…These two frameworks pioneered in promoting goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE). For example, KAOS has been employed in many other proposals for deriving functional specification from stakeholder goals (e.g., Hassan et al [83], Aziz et al [19]), and NFR-F has been widely adopted for capturing non-functional requirements (e.g., i* [176], Tropos [30], and Techne [101]).…”

A first attempt to combine SysML requirements diagrams and B

“…Moreover, this bridge balances the trade-off between complexity of rigid formality (B method) and expressiveness of semiformal approaches (SysML). Most of the existing work aiming at establishing links between goal models and formal methods, such as [3,10,16,18], consider KAOS and B or VDM++. The main difference with our work is that they consider only the last level of the goal hierarchy, that is, the requisite goals.…”