Biblio

In software engineering, the aspect of addressing security requirements is considered to be of paramount importance. In most cases, however, security requirements for a system are considered as non-functional requirements (NFRs) and are addressed at the very end of the software development life cycle. The increasing number of security incidents in software systems around the world has made researchers and developers rethink and consider this issue at an earlier stage. An important and essential step towards this process is the elicitation of relevant security requirements. In a recent work, Imtiaz et al. proposed a framework for creating a mapping between existing requirements and the vulnerabilities associated with them. The idea is that, this mapping can be used by developers to predict potential vulnerabilities associated with new functional requirements and capture security requirements to avoid these vulnerabilities. However, to what extent, such existing vulnerability information can be useful in security requirements elicitation is still an open question. In this paper, we design a human subject study to answer this question. We also present the results of a pilot study and discuss their implications. Preliminary results show that existing vulnerability information can be a useful resource in eliciting security requirements and lays ground work for a full scale study.

Discovering vulnerabilities is an information-intensive task that requires a developer to locate the defects in the code that have security implications. The task is difficult due to the growing code complexity and some developer's lack of security expertise. Although tools have been created to ease the difficulty, no single one is sufficient. In practice, developers often use a combination of tools to uncover vulnerabilities. Yet, the basis on which different tools are composed is under explored. In this paper, we examine the composition base by taking advantage of the tool design patterns informed by foraging theory. We follow a design science methodology and carry out a three-step empirical study: mapping 34 foraging-theoretic patterns in a specific vulnerability discovery tool, formulating hypotheses about the value and cost of foraging when considering two composition scenarios, and performing a human-subject study to test the hypotheses. Our work offers insights into guiding developers' tool usage in detecting software vulnerabilities.

Due to the abundance of security breaches we continue to see, the software development community is recently paying attention to a more proactive approach towards security. This includes predicting vulnerability before exploitation employing static code analysis and machine learning techniques. Such mechanisms, however, are designed to detect post-implementation vulnerabilities. As the root of a vulnerability can often be traced back to the requirement specification, and vulnerability discovered later in the development life cycle is more expensive to fix, we need additional preventive mechanisms capable of predicting vulnerability at a much earlier stage. In this paper, we propose a novel framework providing an automated support to predict vulnerabilities for a requirement as early as during requirement engineering. We further present a preliminary demonstration of our framework and the promising results we observe clearly indicate the value of this new research idea.