Discovering and Understanding Multi-dimensional Correlations among Certification Requirements with application to Risk Assessment," presented at the (2007)
by R A Gandhi, S W Lee
Venue: 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference
r-analytica: Requirements analytics for certification & accreditation
by S W Lee, R A Gandhi, W S, A Murty - in [In the Proc. of the 15th IEEE Int. Requirements Engg. Conf. (RE 07)Posters, Demos and Exhibits Session , 2007
...as for producing insightful C&A artifacts. From a methodological aspect, its application areas first facilitate compliance information (evidence) gathering [7] and later support analytical activities =-=[3]-=- upon the collected evidences. 2.1 C&A Information Gathering Activities − Common Understanding of C&A Requirements and their applicability. A primary C&A activity is to understand C&A requirements and...
Extracting Security Control Requirements
by J. Hosey, R. Gamble - in Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop , 2010
"... Expressing security controls as functional requirements aids in the verification step of security certification and accreditation. Distributed, multi-component systems or systems of systems (SoSs) are difficult to verify because the security controls must be understood in functional terms with respe ..."
Expressing security controls as functional requirements aids in the verification step of security certification and accreditation. Distributed, multi-component systems or systems of systems (SoSs) are difficult to verify because the security controls must be understood in functional terms with respect to their local effects on components, their global effects on the SoS, and their effect on component information exchange. In this paper, we define a process to formulate functional requirements from security controls with SoSs as the target. The process starts by extracting model elements associated with assets, functions, organization variables, and external influences. These models are composed across a set of security controls and normalized to maintain consistency and remove redundancies. We apply the models to SoSs to provide essential details to their specification in functional requirements. The objective is to reduce ambiguity when verifying SoSs as well as minimize recertification efforts when the system or security expectations changes.
...stem, the independent components, and their information exchange. Previous research maps the text of the controls to risk components (e.g. assets and criticality) to correlate with control categories =-=[4]-=-. Naldurg et al. [7] model their security controls through the explicit modeling of insecure states. Other research creates a UML meta-model to represent component policies as attributes, behaviors, a...
Security controls applied to web service architectures
by R. Baird, R. Gamble - in 19th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering , 2010
"... Security certification assesses the security posture of a software system to verify its compliance with diverse, pre-specified security controls identified by guidelines from NIST and the US Department of Defense. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are difficult to certify because they require com ..."
Security certification assesses the security posture of a software system to verify its compliance with diverse, pre-specified security controls identified by guidelines from NIST and the US Department of Defense. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are difficult to certify because they require compliance verification over a mix of local, global, and interaction criteria dictated by the policies of the participating services and SOA governance. Web services further contribute to this difficulty because they lack direct methods to express security controls. Besides being understandable, the method of expression should indicate potential problems complying with chosen services. This paper presents a method for configuring of web service standards to enforce security requirements on service interaction specification documents within a SOA. The outcome serves as a mechanism to direct the population of constraints derived from security controls within standards specification documents, such as WS-Policy. We focus on security controls for auditing and how these can be enforced in an SOA. We introduce a reusable architecture to notate the comparison of security controls across services. 1.
... and consistent when securing systems of the same product line [5]. Previous research maps the text of the controls to risk components (assets, criticality, etc.) to correlate with control categories =-=[6]-=-. Researchers examine SOA security issues by focusing on mitigation strategies such as determining the existence of a violation by employing models to understand how assets traverse services [1]. Secu...
Visual Analytics for Requirements-driven Risk Assessment
by Robin A. G, Seok-won Lee
"... Risk assessment is a complex decision making process during Certification and Accreditation (C&A) activities. It requires to understand the multidimensional correlations among numerous C&A requirements to reason about their collective and adequate behavior to minimize risks to a software sys ..."
Risk assessment is a complex decision making process during Certification and Accreditation (C&A) activities. It requires to understand the multidimensional correlations among numerous C&A requirements to reason about their collective and adequate behavior to minimize risks to a software system. Also, diverse stakeholders in the organizational hierarchy should be able to comprehend and utilize the risk assessment artifacts to agree upon an acceptable level of risks and justify the criticality and cost of mitigation strategies related to C&A requirements. We believe requirements visualization plays an important role in providing rich contextual information for understanding and analyzing risk assessment artifacts and present our initial experiences in using intuitive visual metaphors and their explanations for requirements-driven risk assessment [8] [11]. 1.
...mation for understanding and analyzing risk assessment artifacts and present our initial experiences in using intuitive visual metaphors and their explanations for requirements-driven risk assessment =-=[8]-=- [11]. 1. Introduction Security certification establishes the extent to which a particular design and implementation meets a set of specified security requirements (usually referred to as baseline sec...
Revised (Day Month Year) Accepted (Day Month Year)
by Seok-won Lee, Robin A. Gandhi, Siddharth J. Wagle , 2008
"... Services as abstractions of functionality have enabled the engineering of systems that support welldefined processes with relative ease. This success leads to aspirations for achieving greater complexity with the service-oriented paradigm. In particular, we address the case where the process definit ..."
Services as abstractions of functionality have enabled the engineering of systems that support welldefined processes with relative ease. This success leads to aspirations for achieving greater complexity with the service-oriented paradigm. In particular, we address the case where the process definition is tailored differently in each instantiation based on negotiations among stakeholders of a socio-technical context. For such cases the process definition invariably crosscuts the architecture of a process-support system that composes available services. However, use of pre-defined process variations may bias the tailoring effort and thus, act against the original motivation of having a flexible definition. On the other hand, the characteristics of process complexity and tailorability introduce differences between stakeholder understanding of the process activities and their manifestation in tool support. We encounter these issues while developing a service-oriented process-support system for a security Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process. In this paper, we present our approach to effectively separate the C&A process definition from the architecture of its process-support system. We employ ontological modeling techniques to explicitly model the process definition and later expose it as a service to provide weaving rules for dynamically composing the process-support system architecture at runtime. The feasibility of our approach has been demonstrated in the design of a service-oriented architecture for a prototype workbench that
...evious research efforts towards modeling regulatory security requirements. Our techniques [43] [41] have been applied to model the requirements for the DITSCAP [14] with promising preliminary results =-=[38]-=- [42] [44] [45]. 2.1. Regulatory Security Requirements Modeling Our goal to model regulatory security requirements is to facilitate a common understanding of the complex constraints imposed by them on...
Research/Tool Demonstration. r-AnalytiCA: Requirements Analytics for Certification & Accreditation
by Seok-won Lee, Robin A. G, Siddharth J. Wagle, Ajeet B. Murty
Ontology Guided Risk Analysis: From Informal Specifications to Formal Metrics
by Robin Gandhi, Seok-won Lee , 2009
"... The level of compliance with security certification requirements is the primary driver of the decision to accredit a software system into operation with an acceptable level of risk. However, given the complexity of current software systems, numerous natural language Certification and Accreditation ..."
The level of compliance with security certification requirements is the primary driver of the decision to accredit a software system into operation with an acceptable level of risk. However, given the complexity of current software systems, numerous natural language Certification and Accreditation (C&A) requirements, and ad-hoc processes to assess compliance, this decision is often based on the subjective judgment of the designated officials rather than well-designed metrics and measures. This chapter presents our ongoing research on ontology guided process of building "formal metrics " for understanding risk from the informal specification of security requirements and related evidence collected from the C&A process. The transformation of informal sources (in the problem space) into a representation that supports well-defined metrics (in the solution space) is realized through a combination of knowledge engineering and requirements engineering techniques. Our research outlines a methodological approach for metrics development and understanding using the structured representation of regulatory security requirements in a problem domain ontology. The metrics derived from the domain ontology create a traceable chain of analytical thoughts with software artifacts (e.g. requirements, design, and code). We provide concrete examples for the feasibility of our research findings through its application to a security C&A process and the resulting tool suite.
Reasoning about Policy Noncompliance
by R. Baird, R. Gamble
"... In this paper, we introduce a tuple notation for noncompliance that represents certification problems when meeting security controls in distributed, multi-component software systems. The security controls are adopted from NIST SP800-53 and DoD 8500.2 documents. We derive tuples from component polici ..."
In this paper, we introduce a tuple notation for noncompliance that represents certification problems when meeting security controls in distributed, multi-component software systems. The security controls are adopted from NIST SP800-53 and DoD 8500.2 documents. We derive tuples from component policies and interactions, along with the risks associated with violating the security controls. Tuples can be clustered from different perspectives, reasoned about to target the cause and strength of noncompliance. They can also be mapped to specific security concerns and weaknesses in the multi-component architecture.
...problems may require the application of multiple security patterns. Previous research maps the text of the controls to risk components (assets, criticality, etc.) to correlate with control categories =-=[8]-=-. Other research creates a UML meta-model to represent component policies in the form of attributes, behaviors, and mechanisms to express controls and find conflicts [9]. Understanding the cause and e...