Meta-Modeling Based Secure Software Development Processes

Abstract

This work suggests a multilevel support to software developers, who often lack knowledge and skills on how to proceed to develop secure software. In fact, developing software with such quality is a hard and complex task that involves many additional security-dedicated activities which are usually omitted in traditional software development lifecycles or integrated but not efficiently and appropriately deployed in some others. To federate all these software security-assurance activities in a structured way and provide the required guidelines for choosing and using them in a flexible development process, authors used meta-modeling techniques and dynamic process execution that consider developer's affinities and product's states. The proposed approach formalizes existing secure software development processes, allows integration of new ones, prevents ad-hoc executions and is supported by a tool to facilitate its deployment. A case study is given here to exemplify the proposed approach application and to illustrate some of its advantages.