Finding Potential Threats in Several Security Targets for Eliciting Security Requirements

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Abstract

Threats to existing systems help requirements analysts to elicit security requirements for a new system similar to such systems because security requirements specify how to protect the system against threats and similar systems require similar means for protection. We propose a method of finding potential threats that can be used for eliciting security requirements for such a system. The method enables analysts to find additional security requirements when they have already elicited one or a few threats. The potential threats are derived from several security targets (STs) in the Common Criteria. An ST contains knowledge related to security requirements such as threats and objectives. It also contains their explicit relationships. In addition, individual objectives are explicitly related to the set of means for protection, which are commonly used in any STs. Because we focus on such means to find potential threats, our method can be applied to STs written in any languages, such as English or French. We applied and evaluated our method to three different domains. In our evaluation, we enumerated all threat pairs in each domain. We then predicted whether a threat and another in each pair respectively threaten the same requirement according to the method. The recall of the prediction was more than 70% and the precision was 20 to 40% in three domains.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{kaiya-iccgi2015,
    author = {Haruhiko Kaiya and Shinpei Ogata and Shinpei Hayashi and Motoshi Saeki and Takao Okubo and Nobukazu Yoshioka and Hironori Washizaki and Atsuo Hazeyama},
    title = {Finding Potential Threats in Several Security Targets for Eliciting Security Requirements},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology},
    pages = {83--92},
    year = 2015,
}