An Asset-Oriented Method for Evaluating the Security of Software Architecture Quantitatively

Abstract

Even though the security of software architecture plays an important role in the security of complex and large-size software systems, there are still very few feasible methods to evaluate the security of software architecture quantitatively. To fill this gap, we propose an asset-oriented method to quantitatively evaluate the security of software architecture in this paper. The core idea is that we first use a multi-hierarchy dependence graph (MHDG) to describe the system and capture the dependence information between hierarchies, then we mark the positions of assets and attack points on MHDG, afterwards we identify potential attack paths and feasible attack paths from attack points to assets, and finally we evaluate the security of software architecture using some indicators from the perspective of software developers and defenders. We validated the method on four architectural styles and five evolutionary versions. Results show that it accurately captures the security differences among four representative architectural styles, effectively reflects security variations across five evolutionary versions of the same system, and facilitates security-oriented architectural optimization. Moreover, compared with random reinforcement strategies, our method achieves greater improvement in system security under the same protection cost, demonstrating practical value for security-aware architectural design.