Enhancing Security Requirements Engineering by Organisational Learning

More and more software projects today are security-related in one way or the other. Requirements engineers often fail to recognise indicators for security problems which is a major source of security problems in practice. Identifying security-relevant requirements is labour-intensive and errorprone. In order to facilitate the security requirements elicitation process, we present an approach supporting organisational learning on security requirements by establishing company-wide experience resources, and a socio-technical network to benefit from them. The approach is based on modelling the flow of requirements and related experiences. Based on those models, we enable people to exchange experiences about security-requirements while they write and discuss project requirements. At the same time, the approach enables participating stakeholders to learn while they write requirements. This can increase security awareness and facilitate learning on both individual and organisational levels. As a basis for our approach, we introduce heuristic assistant tools which support reuse of existing security-related experiences. In particular, they include Bayesian classifiers which issue a warning automatically when new requirements seem to be security-relevant. Our results indicate that this is feasible, in particular if the classifier is trained with domain specific data and documents from previous projects. We show how the ability to identify security-relevant requirements can be improved using this approach. We illustrate our approach by providing a step-by-step example of how we improved the security requirements engineering process at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and report on experiences made in this application.

Eliciting Security Requirements and Tracing them to Design: An Integration of Common Criteria, Heuristics, and UMLsec

Building secure systems is difficult for many reasons. This paper deals with two of the main challenges: (i) the lack of security expertise in development teams, and (ii) the inadequacy of existing methodologies to support developers who are not security experts. The security standard ISO 14508 (Common Criteria) together with secure design techniques such as UMLsec can provide the security expertise, knowledge, and guidelines that are needed. However, security expertise and guidelines are not stated explicitly in the Common Criteria. They are rather phrased in security domain terminology and difficult to understand for developers. This means that some general security and secure design expertise are required to fully take advantage of the Common Criteria and UMLsec. In addition, there is the problem of tracing security requirements and objectives into solution design,which is needed for proof of requirements fulfilment. This paper describes a security requirements engineering methodology called SecReq. SecReq combines three techniques: the Common Criteria, the heuristic requirements editorHeRA, andUMLsec. SecReqmakes systematic use of the security engineering knowledge contained in the Common Criteria and UMLsec, as well as security-related heuristics in the HeRA tool. The integrated SecReq method supports early detection of security-related issues (HeRA), their systematic refinement guided by the Common Criteria, and the ability to trace security requirements into UML design models. A feedback loop helps reusing experiencewithin SecReq and turns the approach into an iterative process for the secure system life-cycle, also in the presence of system evolution.

Security trumps drug control: How securitization explains drug policy paradoxes in Thailand and Vietnam

This paper investigates the paradoxes inherent in Thai and Vietnamese drug policies. The two countries have much in common. Both are ultra-prohibitionist states which employ repressive policies to contain drug markets. Their policies have, however, diverged in two key areas: opium suppression and harm reduction. Thailand implemented an effective intervention to suppress opium farming centred upon alternative development, whereas Vietnam suppressed opium production through coercive negotiation with nominal alternative development. Vietnam has embraced elements of harm reduction, whereas Thailand has been slow to implement harm reduction policies. This paper hypothesises that these two differences are largely a product of their perceived relationship to security. The two cases demonstrate how once an issue is securitized the ultra-prohibitionist rules of the game can be broken to allow for more humane and pragmatic policies.

Using data envelopment analysis to assess the efficiency of social security systems: the case of income protection in old age

As the number of pensioners in Europe rises relative to the number of people in employment, the gap between the contributions and the benefit levels increases, and consequently ensuring adequate pensions on a sustainable basis has become a major challenge. This study aims to explore the potential of using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique in order to access the efficiency of the income protection in old age, one of the most important branches of Social Security. To this effect, we collected data from the 27 European Union Member States regarding this branch. Our results show important differences among the Member States and stress the importance of identifying best practices to achieve more adequate, sustainable and modernised pension systems. Our results also highlight the importance of using DEA as a decision support tool for policy makers.

What Attitude Changes Are Needed to Cause SMEs to Take a Strategic Approach to Information Security?

Spending on security in an SME usually has to compete with demands for hardware, infrastructure, and strategic applications. In this paper, the authors seek to explore the reasons why smaller SMEs in particular have consistently failed to see securing information as strategic year-on-year spending, and just regard as part of an overall tight IT budget. The authors scrutinise the typical SMEs reasoning for choosing to see non-spending on security as an acceptable strategic risk. They look particularly at possible reasons why SMEs tend not to take much notice of "scare stories" in the media based on research showing they are increasingly at risk, whilst larger businesses are taking greater precautions and become more difficult to penetrate. The results and their analysis provide useful pointers towards broader business environment changes that would cause SMEs to be more risk-averse and ethical in their approach to securing their own and their clients’ information.

Achieving human security through UN human rights law: prospects and challenges

This paper explores the prospects and challenges of achieving human security through United Nations (UN) human rights law. The paper does not aim to pronounce definitively on the achievement of human security by way of UN human rights law that is, to assess the achievement of human security per se 'as a future end state'. Rather the focus of the paper is firmly placed on the capacity of UN human rights law to achieve human security. The paper departs from the premise that if human rights define human security, international human rights law and UN human rights law in particular should have something to say about the achievement of human security.

Resource security impacts men’s female breast size preferences

It has been suggested human female breast size may act as signal of fat reserves, which in turn indicates access to resources. Based on this perspective, two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that men experiencing relative resource insecurity should perceive larger breast size as more physically attractive than men experiencing resource security. In Study 1, 266 men from three sites in Malaysia varying in relative socioeconomic status (high to low) rated a series of animated figures varying in breast size for physical attractiveness. Results showed that men from the low socioeconomic context rated larger breasts as more attractive than did men from the medium socioeconomic context, who in turn perceived larger breasts as attractive than men from a high socioeconomic context. Study 2 compared the breast size judgements of 66 hungry versus 58 satiated men within the same environmental context in Britain. Results showed that hungry men rated larger breasts as significantly more attractive than satiated men. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that resource security impacts upon men’s attractiveness ratings based on women’s breast size.

Providing User Security Guarantees in Public Infrastructure Clouds

The infrastructure cloud (IaaS) service model offers improved resource flexibility and availability, where tenants - insulated from the minutiae of hardware maintenance - rent computing resources to deploy and operate complex systems. Large-scale services running on IaaS platforms demonstrate the viability of this model; nevertheless, many organizations operating on sensitive data avoid migrating operations to IaaS platforms due to security concerns. In this paper, we describe a framework for data and operation security in IaaS, consisting of protocols for a trusted launch of virtual machines and domain-based storage protection. We continue with an extensive theoretical analysis with proofs about protocol resistance against attacks in the defined threat model. The protocols allow trust to be established by remotely attesting host platform configuration prior to launching guest virtual machines and ensure confidentiality of data in remote storage, with encryption keys maintained outside of the IaaS domain. Presented experimental results demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed protocols. The framework prototype was implemented on a test bed operating a public electronic health record system, showing that the proposed protocols can be integrated into existing cloud environments.