Managing security risks
Roman Wirtz, Maritta Heisel · 2019
Threats that harm the security of software become more and more frequent. Such incidents can lead to substantial damage, not only financially, but also in terms of reputation loss. The combination of that consequence and the likelihood of an incident is called risk. Risk management processes describe coordinated activities to identify, evaluate and treat those risks. To reduce costs, it is necessary to concentrate on the most severe risks and to address those risks as early as possible by following the principle of security-by-design. In this paper, we introduce a template that enables security analysts to specify controls to treat risks in a systematic manner. Instances of the template make knowledge about controls reusable in future development projects. We designed our template for an application during requirements engineering. Our aim is to bridge the gap between functional requirements engineering and security. To do so, we consider controls as early aspects and relate them to relevant functional requirements and threats which can be treated by the control. Our template makes explicit how those aspects can be integrated into a requirements model by using a problem-based approach. To simplify the evaluation of controls, we adapt the concept of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. The defined attributes will later allow a semi-automatic suggestion and evaluation of suitable controls.