Refining the evaluation of the degree of security of a system built using security patterns

Abstract

Evaluating the degree of security of a specific software system is a difficult problem and many metrics have been proposed. However, if the system has been built with a methodology that uses patterns as artifacts, a systematic and rather simple evaluation is possible and a metric has been proposed for this evaluation: perform threat enumeration, check if the patterns in the system can stop the identified threats, and calculate the coverage of these threats by the patterns. We refine here that approach by considering the additional effect of the policies (requirements) defined for the system and by using weights for threats and policies.