Build and Watch: Towards Intrusion-Aware Software Systems

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Security is of prime importance in the design and implementation of software systems. Nevertheless, in most software development processes, security issues are not addressed from the beginning of a software development life cycle and sometimes even are looked at after the deployment of the software. As a result, these software systems remain vulnerable to various attacks. The growing complexity of software systems requires more serious attention of software engineers and security analysts to monitor software systems for their security. However, the main focus in most secure software development methodologies is not specifically on integrating or monitoring security aspects along the development phases. This research program will focus on building intrusion-aware software systems and then watching or monitoring those at runtime. The ultimate goal of this research program is to develop methodologies allowing the generation of more secure software systems by enabling them to monitor intrusions automatically in the modern distributed environments. The proposed program will be carried out to achieve this goal using two complementary approaches of development and monitoring: i) Security requirements specification-based; ii) Security pattern-based. A specification method will be proposed which can be used to specify operational behavior of the system both under normal condition and when it is under known attacks. The same specification will be utilized at runtime for identifying the deviation from the specification. Tools will be built for intrusion scenario description and automatic signature generation from the scenarios. Finally, software monitoring systems will be developed to detect any intrusions into the software systems by analyzing the run-time behavior of the systems with respect to the generated signatures. Security patterns will be used to realize security requirements in software design and the violation (absence or presence) of these patterns will be detected by automatic analysis of the patterns employing the observed runtime information. As security patterns are the components of design and correspond to security requirements, any violation of these patterns indicates the violation of the corresponding requirements. The methods and tools derived from this research program will be assessed on case studies from real world security-critical applications. The outcomes of this research will play a vital role in bridging the gap between software engineering and security engineering practices for modern, complex, and distributed software systems. Security of software systems is more crucial now as it is the basis for the security of new computing paradigms and environments such as Cloud and mobile. One of the unique aspects of this research program is to provide a balanced training facility for five graduate students in both software engineering and security engineering principles preparing them to build secure software products.