Modeling and design of secure software systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Poor security of software systems (in form of high vulnerability to intrusions) may allow unauthorized takeover of the critical functionalities of those systems, leading to events ranging from bank fraud to terrorist activities. Since late fixing of security flaws tends to be more time consuming and expensive, it is important to have faster modeling techniques that would assist designers to analyze designs quickly and easily, early in the design cycle. All designs involve tradeoffs and if we simply optimize for the security attribute, we stand the chance of ignoring other attributes of importance, for example performance and dependability, which are affected by security solutions. My proposed research is concerned with developing modeling techniques and tools that would help in analyzing multiple attributes - performance, dependability and security - in a unified way, and would aid in better understanding of design tradeoffs. Key features of this proposal include: (i) development of novel modeling techniques for probabilistic validation of security of software systems, (ii) integrated models to analyze performance, dependability and security, (iii) training of research students in the engineering of dependable and secure software. The research will employ stochastic models for representing system behavior.