Assimilating and Optimizing Software Assurance in the SDLC

Software Assurance is the planned and systematic set of activities that ensures software processes and products conform to requirements while standards and procedures in a manner that builds trusted systems and secure software. While absolute security may not yet be possible, procedures and practices exist to promote assurance in the software lifecycle. In this paper, the authors present a framework and step-wise approach towards achieving and optimizing assurance by infusing security knowledge, techniques, and methodologies into each phase of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).

Agile Software Development

In this article, the authors contrast the results of a series of interviews with agile software development organizations with a case study of a distributed agile development effort, focusing on how information security is taken care of in an agile context. The interviews indicate that small and medium-sized agile software development organizations do not use any particular methodology to achieve security goals, even when their software is web-facing and potential targets of attack. This case study confirms that even in cases where security is an articulated requirement, and where security design is fed as input to the implementation team, there is no guarantee that the end result meets the security objectives. The authors contend that security must be built as an intrinsic software property and emphasize the need for security awareness throughout the whole software development lifecycle. This paper suggests two extensions to agile methodologies that may contribute to ensuring focus on security during the complete lifecycle.

Secure Software Education

This article establishes a context for secure information systems development as well as a set of models used to develop and apply a secure software production pedagogy. A generic system model is presented to support the system context development, and to provide a framework for discussing security relationships that exist between and among information systems and their applications. An asset protection model is tailored to provide a conceptual ontology for secure information system topics, and a stable logical framework that is independent of specific organizations, technologies, and their associated changes. This asset protection model provides a unique focus for each of the three primary professional communities associated with the development and operation of secure information systems. In this paper, a secure adaptive response model is discussed to provide an analytical tool to assess risk associated with the development and deployment of secure information systems, and to use as a security metric. A pedagogical model for information assurance curriculum development is then established in the context and terms of the developed secure information system models. The relevance of secure coding techniques to the production of secure systems, architectures, and organizational operations is also discussed.

A Tool Support for Secure Software Integration

This paper presents a tool for the integration of security-aware services based applications that is constructed on the principles of security characterization of individual software services. The tool uses the technique of reasoning between the ensured security properties of the services and the security requirements of the user’s system. Rather than reporting the research outcomes, in this paper the authors describe the architecture and capabilities of the tool for secure software integration. The main objective of this paper is to show that an automatic tool support could assist the process of security-aware service based software integration.

Software Engineering Security Based on Business Process Modeling

Security requirements must be tackled early in software design and embedded in corresponding business process models. As a blueprint for software design, business process models complemented with security requirements will prevent many security breaches. To accomplish secure business process modeling, the underlying method must adhere to certain capabilities and capture actions, actor roles, and interactions. The resultant models should lend themselves to automatic analysis (simulation) to ensure captured security requirements are correctly aligned with the process flow. Thus, the tradeoff between the level of security and business performance can be studied before actual software design. Since unauthorized actions cause security breaches, the software the system’s social setting could be a cradle for defining security requirements. Security requirements can be identified based on the roles, authorities, and obligations of the social actors using the system. This paper introduces a method for security embedded business process modeling. The proposed method draws on two well-tested theoretical foundations—enterprise ontology and organizational semiotics.

A Formal Approach for Securing XML Document

With the ever increasing demand for the Web-based applications over the Internet, the related security issue has become a great concern. Web document security has been studied by many researchers and various security mechanisms have been proposed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the security issue of the XML documents. We discuss a protection mechanism and investigate a formal approach to ensure the security of Web-based XML documents. Our approach starts by introducing a high level language to specify an XML document and its protection authorizations. We also discuss and investigate the syntax and semantics of the language. The flexible and powerful access control specification can effectively protect the documents from unauthorized attempts.

Integrating Access Control into UML for Secure Software Modeling and Analysis

Access control models are often an orthogonal activity when designing, implementing, and deploying software applications. Role-based access control (RBAC) which targets privileges based on responsibilities within an application and mandatory access control (MAC) that emphasizes the protection of information via security tags are two dominant approaches in this regard. The integration of access control into software modeling and analysis is often loose and significantly lacking, particularly when security is such a high-priority concern in applications. This paper presents an approach to integrate RBAC and MAC into use-case, class, and sequence diagrams of the unified modeling language (UML), providing a cohesive approach to secure software modeling that elevates security to a first-class citizen in the process. To insure that a UML design with security does not violate RBAC or MAC requirements, design-time analysis checks security constraints whenever a new UML element is added or an existing UML element is modified, while post-design analysis checks security constraints across the entire design for conflicts and inconsistencies. These access control extensions and security analyses have been prototyped within a UML tool.

A Rigorous Approach to the Definition of an International Vocational Master’s Degree in Information Security Management

In Luxembourg, like in many other countries, information security has become a central issue for private companies and public organizations. Today, information is the main asset of a company for its business and, at the same time, regulations are imposing more and more rules regarding its management. As a consequence, in Luxembourg, a clear need has emerged regarding the development of new learning trajectory fulfilling the requirements of the new job profile associated with a Chief Security Officer. This need was relayed by the national professional security association which asked for the development of a new education program targeting professional people engaged in a lifelong learning trajectory. The paper reports on the rigorous and scientific participatory approach for producing the adequate learning program meeting requirements elicited from the professional association members. The authors present the skills card that has been elaborated for capturing these requirements and the program, which has been built together with the University of Luxembourg for matching these requirements. This program proposes a holistic approach to information security management by including organization, human and technical security risks within the context of regulations and norms.

Towards Designing E-Services that Protect Privacy

The growth of electronic services (e-services) has resulted in large amounts of personal information in the hands of service organizations like banks, insurance companies, and online retailers. This has led to the realization that such information must be protected, not only to comply with privacy regulations but also and more importantly, to attract clients. One important dimension of this goal is to design e-services that protect privacy. In this paper, the author proposes a design approach that incorporates privacy risk analysis of UML diagrams to minimize privacy risks in the final design. The approach iterates between the risk analysis and design modifications to eliminate the risks until a design is obtained that is close to being risk free.

Development of a Master of Software Assurance Reference Curriculum

Modern society is deeply and irreversibly dependent on software systems of remarkable scope and complexity in areas that are essential for preserving this way of life. The security and correct functioning of these systems are vital. Recognizing these realities, the U. S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) enlisted the resources of the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a curriculum for a Master of Software Assurance degree program and define transition strategies for implementation. In this article, the authors present an overview of the Master of Software Assurance curriculum project, including its history, student prerequisites and outcomes, a core body of knowledge, and curriculum architecture from which to create such a degree program. The authors also provide suggestions for implementing a Master of Software Assurance program.