Biblio

Adaptive authentication systems identify and enforce suitable methods to verify that someone (user) or something (device) is eligible to access a service or a resource. An authentication method is usually adapted in response to changes in the security risk or the user's behaviour. Previous work on adaptive authentication systems provides limited guidance about i) what and how contextual factors can affect the selection of an authentication method; ii) which requirements are relevant to an adaptive authentication system and iii) how authentication methods can affect the satisfaction of the relevant requirements. In this paper, we provide a holistic framework informed by previous research to characterize the adaptive authentication problem and support the development of an adaptive authentication system. Our framework explicitly considers the contextual factors that can trigger an adaptation, the requirements that are relevant during decision making and their trade-offs, as well as the authentication methods that can change as a result of an adaptation. From the gaps identified in the literature, we elicit a set of challenges that can be addressed in future research on adaptive authentication.

The evolution of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) provides more efficient software development methods for building and engineering new value-added service-based applications. SOC is a computing paradigm that relies on Web services as fundamental elements. Research and technical advancements in Web services composition have been considered as an effective opportunity to develop new service-based applications satisfying complex requirements rapidly and efficiently. In this paper, we present a novel approach enhancing the composition of semantic Web services. The novelty of our approach, as compared to others reported in the literature, rests on: i) mapping user's/organization's requirements with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and semantic descriptions using ontologies, ii) considering functional requirements and also different types of non-functional requirements, such as quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE), and quality of business (QoBiz), iii) using Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) technique to select the optimal set of Web services, iv) considering composability levels between sequential Web services using Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) technique to decrease the required adaptation efforts, and finally, v) validating the obtained service-based applications by performing an analytical technique, which is the monitoring. The approach experimented on an extended version of the OWLS-TC dataset, which includes more than 10830 Web services descriptions from various domains. The obtained results demonstrate that our approach allows to successfully and effectively compose Web services satisfying different types of user's functional and non-functional requirements.

The growing use of ICT in complex and critical infrastructures in the energy- and maritime domain leads to the development of system-of-system engineering efforts especially for system architectures. Such efforts need to integrate a standardized elicitation and harmonization of requirements between different interoperability perspectives and with domain-specific aspects. According to this, the paper adapts the existing architecture management approaches SGAM and MAF for a methodology to structure the identification and harmonization of requirements considering domain specific characteristics and interoperability.

Interactive systems are developed according to requirements, which may be, for instance, documentation, prototypes, diagrams, etc. The informal nature of system requirements may be a source of problems: it may be the case that a system does not implement the requirements as expected, thus, a way to validate whether an implementation follows the requirements is needed. We propose a novel approach to validating a system using formal models of the system. In this approach, a set of traces generated from the execution of the real interactive system is searched over the state space of the formal model. The scalability of the approach is demonstrated by an application to an industrial system in the nuclear plant domain. The combination of trace analysis and formal methods provides feedback that can bring improvements to both the real interactive system and the formal model.

Sociotechnical systems (STSs), where users interact with software components, support automated logging, i.e., what a user has performed in the system. However, most systems do not implement automated processes for inspecting the logs when a misuse happens. Deciding what needs to be logged is crucial as excessive amounts of logs might be overwhelming for human analysts to inspect. The goal of this research is to aid software practitioners to implement automated forensic logging by providing a systematic method of using attackers' malicious intentions to decide what needs to be logged. We propose Lokma: a normative framework to construct logging rules for forensic knowledge. We describe the general forensic process of Lokma, and discuss related directions.

Security analysis requires some degree of knowledge to align threats to vulnerabilities in information technology. Despite the abundance of security requirements, the evidence suggests that security experts are not applying these checklists. Instead, they default to their background knowledge to identify security vulnerabilities. To better understand the different effects of security checklists, analysis and expertise, we conducted a series of interviews to capture and encode the decisionmaking process of security experts and novices during three security requirements analysis exercises. Participants were asked to analyze three kinds of artifacts: source code, data flow diagrams, and network diagrams, for vulnerabilities, and then to apply a requirements checklist to demonstrate their ability to mitigate vulnerabilities. We framed our study using Situation Awareness theory to elicit responses that were analyzed using coding theory and grounded analysis. Our results include decision-making patterns that characterize how analysts perceive, comprehend and project future threats, and how these patterns relate to selecting security mitigations. Based on this analysis, we discovered new theory to measure how security experts and novices apply attack models and how structured and unstructured analysis enables increasing security requirements coverage. We discuss suggestions of how our method could be adapted and applied to improve training and education instruments of security analysts.

As information security became an increasing concern for software developers and users, requirements engineering (RE) researchers brought new insight to security requirements. Security requirements aim to address security at the early stages of system design while accommodating the complex needs of different stakeholders. Meanwhile, other research communities, such as usable privacy and security, have also examined these requirements with specialized goal to make security more usable for stakeholders from product owners, to system users and administrators. In this paper we report results from conducting a literature survey to compare security requirements research from RE Conferences with the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). We report similarities between the two research areas, such as common goals, technical definitions, research problems, and directions. Further, we clarify the differences between these two communities to understand how they can leverage each other’s insights. From our analysis, we recommend new directions in security requirements research mainly to expand the meaning of security requirements in RE to reflect the technological advancements that the broader field of security is experiencing. These recommendations to encourage cross- collaboration with other communities are not limited to the security requirements area; in fact, we believe they can be generalized to other areas of RE. 

Project documentation often contains security-relevant statements that are indicative of the security requirements of a system. However these statements may not be explicitly specified or straightforward to locate. At best, requirements analysts manually extract applicable security requirements from project documents. However, security requirements that are not explicitly stated may not be considered during implementation. The goal of this research is to aid requirements analysts in generating security requirements through identifying securityrelevant statements in project documentation and providing context-specific templates to generate security requirements. First, we identify the most prevalent security objectives from software security literature. To identify security-relevant statements in project documentation, we propose a tool-based process to classify statements as related to zero or more security objectives. We then develop a set of context-specific templates to help translate the security objectives of each statement into explicit sets of security functional requirements. We evaluate our process on six documents from the electronic healthcare software industry, identifying 46% of statements as implicitly or explicitly related to security. Our classification approach identified security objectives with a precision of .82 and recall of .79. From our total set of classified statements, we extracted 16 context-specific templates that identify 41 reusable security requirements.