Software Security Analysis Based on the Principle of Defense-in-Depth
Ahmad Jalali, Mohammad Ali Hadavi · 2018
Defense in depth is a well-known secure design principle. Although the software security community acknowledge the importance of such a principle in developing secure systems, it has not been investigated enough to be the basis of security analysis of software systems. In this paper we analyze software security with respect to the defense-in-depth principle. We propose a model for security analysis in which the defense-in depth is quantitatively measured. The measurement capability lets developers choose security countermeasures in such a way that not only the security risks decrease but also the amount of defense-in-depth increases. We experimentally evaluate our model using a case study. The results show that adding security countermeasures to reduce security risks has different effects on security with respect to the defense-in-depth, and implementing a security countermeasure, while reducing the total risk, does not necessarily lead to an improved amount of the defense-in-depth.