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Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases

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Abstract

Use cases have become increasingly common during requirements engineering, but they offer limited support for eliciting security threats and requirements. At the same time, the importance of security is growing with the rise of phenomena such as e-commerce and nomadic and geographically distributed work. This paper presents a systematic approach to eliciting security requirements based on use cases, with emphasis on description and method guidelines. The approach extends traditional use cases to also cover misuse, and is potentially useful for several other types of extra-functional requirements beyond security.

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Notes

  1. Although the definitions and the metamodel in this section are aligned with the UML, misuse cases do not inherently depend on the UML and can augment other use case techniques equally well.

  2. For simplicity, we will use the term action sequence in this paper, although we often talk about sequences of both actions and interactions. Some authors prefer the term “step” where we use action.

  3. A corresponding abstract metaclass Actor Or Misuser is also possible.

  4. “Mitigate” replaces the “prevent” and “detect” relationships, and “threaten” replaces the “extend” and “include” relationships defined in [17], following a suggestion made by Alexander [22] in both cases.

  5. The common criteria is intended as a security evaluation standard, but because it is organized according to classes, families, and components of security criteria, and because security criteria can be seen as operational security goals, the common criteria also entails a typology of security goals.

  6. Most of the techniques and methods proposed in this paper may apply equally well to unintentional harm, but that would lead us into the area of safety requirements. The definition of misuse cases given in Sect. 2 explicitly allows for both intentional and inadvertent—or unintentional—misuse.

  7. Project 508011 INTEROP (Interoperability Research for networked enterprises, applications, and software) is a network of excellence under the sixth framework program (IST). It has 50 partners from various European countries.

  8. The CORAS project (IST-2000-25031) addressed risk assessment of security critical systems. It had 11 partners from four countries (UK, Germany, Greece, and Norway). The technical coordinator was SINTEF (N) and the administrative coordinator was Telenor (N). The project was successfully completed in September 2003.

  9. The design angle is particularly evident in [20], where assurance arguments are used to show that the design really satisfies the requirements.

  10. Finally, there are differences in the textual templates: our template describes misuse case actions, exceptions, mitigations, etc. in more detail, whereas McDermott and Fox’ [19] templates provide more detail about the attacker.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

    Guttorm Sindre

  2. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway

    Andreas L. Opdahl

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  1. Guttorm Sindre
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  2. Andreas L. Opdahl
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Correspondence to Guttorm Sindre.

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Sindre, G., Opdahl, A.L. Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases. Requirements Eng 10, 34–44 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-004-0194-4

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