SETER: Towards Architecture-Model Based Security Engineering

2. Motivations And Contributions

Software architecture description languages provide a detailed view on the system’s components, their interfaces and their interactions. We have in such models enough information to derive test cases relevant for the security properties of interest. What could be expected from testing the architecture model is the elicitation of attack scenarios exploiting some architecture level threats, like covert channels, and also lower level vulnerabilities, such as unchecked user input, by locating their activation and manifestation points. More importantly, architecture level vulnerabilities can be identified only by exploiting the architecture model for test generation as they don’t appear in the detailed design test models. However, we don’t find in the literature any research work on security test generation from the architecture model.