Long Term Trends in Security Threats and an Approach for Integrating Them into System Architecture and Design

Abstract

Security is an important consideration in today's systems, and it promises to be both relevant and challenging in the future. Our design and development processes are evolving to incorporate modern methods such as agile development and model-based engineering with the intent to provide flexible and resilient capabilities to our customers quickly and with high quality. As we continue to enhance our practices to achieve these aspirations, security capabilities both at initial deployment and throughout the system lifespan are an important consideration. A literature review of security concerns in general and challenges across a range of domains including civil aviation, smart cities, eLearning, finance and defense reveals a set of recurring long-term trends. These trends suggest challenges to security capabilities in the future. In this paper, we summarize and analyze these trends and propose an approach for addressing them in architecture and design activities.