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  • icse2016_rashid_etal

    Rights statement: © [Rashid et al.] [2016]. This is the authors' version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in {ICSE'16}, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884785

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Discovering “unknown known” security requirements

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Publication date14/05/2016
Host publicationICSE '16 Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Austin, TX, May 14 - 22, 2016
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherACM
Pages866-876
Number of pages11
ISBN (print)9781450339001
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Security is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations in the modern hyper-connected world. A number of theoretical security models are available that provide best practice security guidelines and are widely utilised as a basis to identify and operationalise security requirements. Such models often capture high-level security concepts (e.g., whitelisting, secure configurations, wireless access control, data recovery, etc.), strategies for operationalising such concepts through specific security controls, and relationships between the various concepts and controls. The threat landscape, however, evolves leading to new tacit knowledge that is embedded in or across a variety of security incidents. These unknown knowns alter, or at least demand reconsideration of the theoretical security models underpinning security requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to discover such unknown knowns through multi-incident analysis. The approach is based on a novel combination of grounded theory and incident fault trees. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach through its application to identify revisions to a theoretical security model widely used in industry.