Modeling Security Threat Patterns to Derive Negative Scenarios

Abstract

The elicitation of security requirements is a crucial issue to develop secure business processes and information systems of higher quality. Although we have several methods to elicit security requirements, most of them do not provide sufficient supports to identify security threats. Since threats do not occur so frequently, like exceptional events, it is much more difficult to determine the potentials of threats exhaustively rather than identifying normal behavior of a business process. To reduce this difficulty, accumulated knowledge of threats obtained from practical setting is necessary. In this paper, we present the technique to model knowledge of threats as patterns by deriving the negative scenarios that realize threats and to utilize them during business process modeling. The knowledge is extracted from Security Target documents, based on the international Common Criteria Standard, and the patterns are described with transformation rules on sequence diagrams. In our approach, an analyst composes normal scenarios of a business process with sequence diagrams, and the threat patterns matched to them derives negative scenarios. Our approach has been demonstrated on several examples, to show its practical application.