Model the System from Adversary Viewpoint: Threats Identification and Modeling

TL;DR

This paper presents a meta-model within the SysML-Sec framework that enhances threat identification and modeling by explicitly representing security concerns and their relationships using ontological concepts for better reasoning and understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel security attack meta-model that improves threat modeling through explicit security concern representation and reasoning within the SysML-Sec framework.

Findings

Enhanced threat modeling with explicit security concerns

Improved reasoning about security artifacts

Graphical environment supports better security analysis

Abstract

Security attacks are hard to understand, often expressed with unfriendly and limited details, making it difficult for security experts and for security analysts to create intelligible security specifications. For instance, to explain Why (attack objective), What (i.e., system assets, goals, etc.), and How (attack method), adversary achieved his attack goals. We introduce in this paper a security attack meta-model for our SysML-Sec framework, developed to improve the threat identification and modeling through the explicit representation of security concerns with knowledge representation techniques. Our proposed meta-model enables the specification of these concerns through ontological concepts which define the semantics of the security artifacts and introduced using SysML-Sec diagrams. This meta-model also enables representing the relationships that tie several such concepts together. This representation is then used for reasoning about the knowledge introduced by system designers as well as security experts through the graphical environment of the SysML-Sec framework.