Using abuse frames to bound the scope of security problems

TLDR

Security problems arise from protecting assets against threats, and in systems development they are specified by security requirements derived from threat analysis, but because full system descriptions are often unavailable early, problems must be bounded to relevant domains to enable precise threat identification and requirement elicitation. The poster proposes an approach using abuse frames to structure and bound the scope of security problems. The approach employs abuse frames to delineate relevant system domains, thereby facilitating explicit problem definition and threat analysis.

Abstract

Security problems arise from the concern for protecting assets from security threats. In a systems development process, the security protection of a system is specified by security requirements, identified from the analysis of the threats to the system. However, as it is often not possible to obtain a full system description until late in the RE process, a security problem often has to be described in the context of a bounded scope, that is, one containing only the domains relevant to some part of the functionality of the full system. By binding the scope of a security problem, it can be described more explicitly and precisely, thereby facilitating the identification and analysis of threats, which in turn drive the elicitation and elaboration of security requirements. In this poster, we elaborate on an approach we developed based on abuse frames and suggest how it can provide a means for structuring and bounding the scope security problems.