An Integration of Threat Modeling with Attack Pattern and Misuse Case for Effective Security Requirement Elicitation

Abstract

Today’s security is becoming a brainstorming issue due to inventive attacks. To elicit effective security requirement to the system, software developers need to think like an attacker. This paper considers three effective security requirement elicitation techniques, Threat modelling, Misuse case and Attack pattern. Threat Modeling is a technique to prevent the system from any undesired event by modeling all the information which has the potential to harm the system. It is a process for eliciting security requirement by identifying harmful threats to the system. Misuse case represents negative use cases to model threats and mis-actors to represent attackers. Misuse cases are capable of modeling threat and risk analysis process. Attack Pattern works as a method to identify the attacker’s perspective. Specifically, Threat modelling, Attack pattern and Misuse case are compared on the basis of some parameters. The comparative analysis provides some merits and demerits of these techniques. This paper investigates how misuse cases enhance the performance of threat modeling. This paper also describes an effective way for security requirement elicitation by integrating threat modeling with attack pattern and misuse cases. Keywords: Threat Modeling; Misuse Case; Attack Patterns; Secure software development; Security Requirement Elicitation