Modeling security attacks with statecharts
Omar El Ariss, Dianxiang Xu · 2011
Software security is becoming a key quality concern as software applications are increasingly being used in untrustworthy computing environments such as the internet. Software is designed with the mindset of its functionalities and cost, where the focus is on the operational behavior while security concerns are neglected or marginally considered. As a result, software engineers build the software while lacking the knowledge about security and its effect on the system. This paper presents an approach for modeling the behavior of security threats using statecharts. The proposed approach introduces modular design for representing threats through the use of components and reusability. Through the focus on the behavior of an attack, software engineers can clearly define and understand security concerns as the application is being designed and developed. In addition, modeling security threats with statecharts makes it convenient to build a consistent semantic link between functional behaviors and security concerns.