Sound development of secure service-based systems

Abstract

Service-based software systems are a useful concept recently developed to support the development of systems offering functions (the so-called services) which may be interrelated or may mutually depend on each other. Although appealing from a practical point of view, the development of service-based software for security-critical systems is, unfortunately, not well understood. Services may easily interact with each other in a way which may have unforeseen consequences on the various security properties provided. In this work, we propose a method for facilitating the development of security-critical service-based software systems using the computer-aided systems engineering tool AutoFocus based on the formal method Focus. We explain our method at the example of a service-based system from the automotive domain.

Pattern-Based Design and Verification of Secure Service Compositions

“…AutoFocus [6], for example, assumes the specification of SBS systems in UML and the security properties to be verified in CTL [18]. These specifications are transformed into the input language of the SVM model checker, which is used to verify the properties.…”

“…These specifications are transformed into the input language of the SVM model checker, which is used to verify the properties. The properties supported by [6] are authentication and authorisation. Dong et al [8] have used security design patterns to model inter-process communications as UML sequence diagrams.…”

“…This was based on transforming annotated BPEL processes into Promela and using SPIN to detect information leakage. Most of the above approaches support a limited number of properties (e.g., [3], [6], [8]). Also verification based on them is likely to be computationally intractable for large SBS systems (note that [3], [6], [8] and [22] do not provide any experimental performance results).…”

“…Existing solutions (e.g., [2][3] [6] [8]) rely on different forms of model checking and theorem proving to verify security properties of service compositions. These approaches typically require the specification of: (a) behavioural models of the software services used by the SBS, (b) the component that orchestrates them to provide the SBS functionality (i.e., the service orchestrator), and (c) the security properties that need to be guaranteed in some temporal logic language.…”

Discovering Secure Service Compositions

“…In this area, service compositions are modeled using formal languages and their required properties are expressed as properties on the model (Deubler et al, 2004;Dong et al, 2010;Bartoletti et al, 2005). Our approach to composition is also model based but uses model based property proofs to identify how overall security properties of compositions can be guaranteed through propagation to properties on the individual components (services) of the composition.…”