Injecting security as aspectable NFR into Software Architecture

Abstract

Complexity of the software development process is often increased by actuality of crosscutting concerns in software requirements; moreover, software security as a particular non-functional requirement of software systems is often addressed late in the software development process. Modeling and analyzing of these concerns and especially security in the software architecture facilitate detecting architectural vulnerabilities, decrease costs of the software maintenance, and reduce finding tangled and complex components in the ultimate design. Aspect oriented ADLs have emerged to overcome this problem; however, imposing radical changes to existing architectural modeling methods is not easily acceptable by architects. In this paper, we present a method to enhance conventional software architecture description languages through utilization of aspect features with special focuses on security. To achieve the goal, aspectable NFRs have been clarified; then, for their description in the software architecture, an extension to xADL 2.0 [E.M. Dashofy, 2005] has been proposed; finally, we illustrate this material along with a case study.