DataProVe: Fully Automated Conformance Verification Between Data Protection Policies and System Architectures

Privacy and data protection by design are relevant parts of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in which businesses and organisations are encouraged to implement measures at an early stage of the system design phase to fulfil data protection requirements. This paper addresses the policy and system architecture design and propose two variants of privacy policy language and architecture description language, respectively, for specifying and verifying data protection and privacy requirements. In addition, we develop a fully automated algorithm based on logic, for verifying three types of conformance relations (privacy, data protection, and functional conformance) between a policy and an architecture specified in our languages’ variants. Compared to related works, this approach supports a more systematic and fine-grained analysis of the privacy, data protection, and functional properties of a system. Our theoretical methods are then implemented as a software tool called DataProVe and its feasibility is demonstrated based on the centralised and decentralised approaches of COVID-19 contact tracing applications.

Designing an architecture description language for nontechnical actors and purposes (NOTE-ADL)

PurposeThe paper proposes the development of a graphical architecture description language (ADL) that allows a better understanding of software architectures for nontechnical actors and purposes and, beyond, can serve as a communication tool between domain experts and IT experts, for instance, in a software development process.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows the methods and guidelines of design science research. By deriving characteristics and general requirements for ADLs from a research literature review and from industry standards, the paper provides a conceptual modeling approach for an ADL. The model design is based on typical requirements and suggestions derived from literature and related work. The application possibilities and advantages are then demonstrated with a usage scenario.FindingsThe paper elaborates a user-oriented ADL that makes software architecture comprehensible for stakeholders and end users. It provides a high level of abstraction and, thus, is not restricted to a particular domain. The paper also provides a corresponding modeling editor as well as an underlying catalogue with symbols and rules for the ADL.Research limitations/implicationsAs this is a conceptual study, the ADL has not been practically evaluated yet. Thus, the usefulness of this academic approach for the industry remains to be validated.Originality/valueThe elaborated ADL can serve as a language to visualize software architectures, particularly in the business domain, in a comprehensible manner. Still, it retains the structured character of ADLs to facilitate communication on an IT-near level. In including nontechnical actors, the approach broadens the overall application capabilities of ADLs.

A Methodology for Automatic Formal Verification of Enterprise Architecture

For over a decade, IT-business alignment has been ranked as a top-priority management concern, but there is little research on practical ways to achieve the alignment. EA development is a continuous iterative process, which implicitly ensures the achievement of a specific IT-business alignment level. Therefore, it is necessary to formalize the requirements for architecture and be able to automatically verify them. The authors propose a new methodology for detecting logical contradictions in enterprise architecture models based on a model checking approach adopted in the context of business modeling. In such a methodology, they use ArchiMate standard for a conceptual enterprise architecture description language which is fully aligned with TOGAF. The authors also offer several important verification queries and demonstrate practical applicability of their approach using a software prototype of the modeling tool which exploits MIT Alloy Analyzer model checking framework integrated with AchiMate Archi workbench.

EAST-ADL

EAST-ADL is an Architecture Description Language (ADL) initially defined in several European-funded research projects and aligned with AUTOSAR and ISO26262. It provides a comprehensive approach for defining automotive electronic systems through an information model that captures engineering information in a standardized form. Aspects covered include vehicle features, requirements, analysis functions, software and hardware components and communication. The representation of the system's implementation is not defined in EAST-ADL itself but by AUTOSAR. However, traceability is supported from EAST-ADL's lower abstraction levels to the implementation level elements in AUTOSAR. In this article the authors describe EAST-ADL in detail, show how it relates to AUTOSAR as well as other significant automotive standards and present recent research work on using and advancing EAST-ADL, the functional safety standard ISO 26262, heterogeneous multi / many core architectures, security and for multi-objective optimization.