Security requirements engineering via commitments

Abstract

Security Requirements Engineering (SRE) is concerned with the elicitation of security needs and the specification of security requirements of the system-to-be. Current approaches to SRE either express stakeholders' needs via high-level organisational abstractions that are hard to map to system design, or specify only technical security requirements. In this paper, we introduce SecCo, an SRE framework that starts with goal-oriented modelling of the security needs and derives security requirements from such needs. Importantly, SecCo relates security requirements to the interaction among actors. Security requirements are specified as social commitments — promises with contractual validity from one actor to another — that define constraints on the way actors can interact. These commitments shall be implemented by the system-to-be.