Composition of least privilege analysis results in software architectures (position paper)
Koen Buyens, Riccardo Scandariato, Wouter Joosen · 2011
Security principles are often neglected by software architects, due to the lack of precise definitions. This results in potentially high-risk threats to systems. Our own previous work tackled this by introducing formal foundations for the least privilege (LP) principle in software architectures and providing a technique to identify violations to this principle. This work shows that this technique can scale by composing the results obtained from the analysis of the sub-parts of a larger system. The technique decomposes the system into independently described subsystems and a description listing the interactions between these subsystems. These descriptions are thence analyzed to obtain LP violations and subsequently composed to obtain the violations of the overall system.