Identifying Implicit Vulnerabilities Through Personas as Goal Models

Abstract

When used in requirements processes and tools, personas have the potential to identify vulnerabilities resulting from misalignment between user expectations and system goals. Typically, however, this potential is unfulfilled as personas and system goals are captured with different mindsets, by different teams, and for different purposes. If personas are visualised as goal models, it may be easier for stakeholders to see implications of their goals being satisfied or denied, and designers to incorporate the creation and analysis of such models into the broader RE tool-chain. This paper outlines a tool-supported approach for finding implicit vulnerabilities from user and system goals by reframing personas as social goal models. We illustrate this approach with a case study where previously hidden vulnerabilities based on human behaviour were identified.

Visualising personas as goal models to find security tensions

“…To integrate personas into goal-oriented security RE, this paper presents a tool-supported approach for visualising personas as goal models, and extends previous work presented at the fourth International Workshop on Security and Privacy RE (Faily et al, 2020a). In doing so, we provide two examples of how this approach can identify security tensions.…”

A validation of QDAcity-RE for domain modeling using qualitative data analysis

“…QDA, and in particular GT, has been used to develop models [5-7, 26, 27, 50], requirements [8,10,40,45], personas [17,18,34], and architectures [3,21]. QDAcity-RE is also focused on producing models.…”