Flaws in Flows: Unveiling Design Flaws via Information Flow Analysis
Paper in proceeding, 2019

This paper presents a practical and formal approach to analyze security-centric information flow policies at the level of the design model. Specifically, we focus on data confidentiality and data integrity objectives. In its guiding principles, the approach is meant to be amenable for designers (e.g., software architects) that have very limited or no background in formal models, logics, and the like. To this aim, we provide an intuitive graphical notation, which is based on the familiar Data Flow Diagrams, and which requires as little effort as possible in terms of extra security-centric information the designer has to provide. The result of the analysis algorithm is the early discovery of design flaws in the form of violations of the intended security properties. The approach is implemented as a publicly available plugin for Eclipse and evaluated with four real-world case studies from publicly available literature.

Data Flow Diagram

Integrity

Secure design

Confidentiality

Author

Katja Tuma

University of Gothenburg

Riccardo Scandariato

University of Gothenburg

Musard Balliu

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Proceedings - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture, ICSA 2019

191-200
9781728105284 (ISBN)

International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA)
Hamburg, Germany,

Holistiskt angreppssätt att förbättra datasäkerhet (HoliSec)

VINNOVA (2015-06894), 2016-04-01 -- 2019-03-31.

Subject Categories

Other Computer and Information Science

Computer Science

Computer Systems

DOI

10.1109/ICSA.2019.00028

More information

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1/3/2024 9