Eliciting Security Requirements and Tracing them to Design: An Integration of Common Criteria, Heuristics, and UMLsec

Building secure systems is difficult for many reasons.
This paper deals with two of the main challenges: (i)
the lack of security expertise in development teams, and (ii)
the inadequacy of existing methodologies to support developers
who are not security experts. The security standard
ISO 14508 (Common Criteria) together with secure design
techniques such as UMLsec can provide the security expertise,
knowledge, and guidelines that are needed. However,
security expertise and guidelines are not stated explicitly in
the Common Criteria. They are rather phrased in security
domain terminology and difficult to understand for developers.
This means that some general security and secure design
expertise are required to fully take advantage of the Common
Criteria and UMLsec. In addition, there is the problem of tracing security requirements and objectives into solution
design,which is needed for proof of requirements fulfilment.
This paper describes a security requirements engineering
methodology called SecReq. SecReq combines three techniques:
the Common Criteria, the heuristic requirements editorHeRA,
andUMLsec. SecReqmakes systematic use of the
security engineering knowledge contained in the Common
Criteria and UMLsec, as well as security-related heuristics
in the HeRA tool. The integrated SecReq method supports
early detection of security-related issues (HeRA), their systematic
refinement guided by the Common Criteria, and the
ability to trace security requirements into UML design models.
A feedback loop helps reusing experiencewithin SecReq
and turns the approach into an iterative process for the secure
system life-cycle, also in the presence of system evolution.

Citation:
Houmb, S. H., Islam, S., Knauss, E., Jürjens, J. & Schneider, K. (2009) 'Eliciting security requirements and tracing them to design: an integration of Common Criteria, heuristics, and UMLsec', Requirements Engineering, 15 (1), pp. 63-93.