Biblio

Secure by design is an approach to developing secure software systems from the ground up. In such approach, the alternate security tactics are first thought, among them, the best are selected and enforced by the architecture design, and then used as guiding principles for developers. Thus, design flaws in the architecture of a software system mean that successful attacks could result in enormous consequences. Therefore, secure by design shifts the main focus of software assurance from finding security bugs to identifying architectural flaws in the design. Current research in software security has been neglecting vulnerabilities which are caused by flaws in a software architecture design and/or deteriorations of the implementation of the architectural decisions. In this paper, we present the concept of Common Architectural Weakness Enumeration (CAWE), a catalog which enumerates common types of vulnerabilities rooted in the architecture of a software and provides mitigation techniques to address them. The CAWE catalog organizes the architectural flaws according to known security tactics. We developed an interactive web-based solution which helps designers and developers explore this catalog based on architectural choices made in their project. CAWE catalog contains 224 weaknesses related to security architecture. Through this catalog, we aim to promote the awareness of security architectural flaws and stimulate the security design thinking of developers, software engineers, and architects.

Security Patterns and Architectural Tactics are two well-known techniques for designing secure software systems. There is little or no empirical evidence on their relative effectiveness for security threats mitigation. This study presents MUA (Misuse activities + Patterns), an extension of misuse activities that incorporates patterns, and reports on a controlled comparison of this method that incorporate these techniques for threat mitigation with regard to MAST (Methodology for Applying Security Tactics) which already incorporates tactics. A simple Tsunami Alert System design was analyzed and modified by 40 undergraduate students, and significant difference was found for security threats mitigation (averaging 3.0 for Patterns versus 1.9 for Tactics, in a 1-to-5 scale). This result is contrary to previous results with professional subjects, leading us to believe that novices benefit more of detailed advice than of high-level concepts.