Application of Validation Obligations to Security Concerns

TL;DR

This paper explores how validation obligations, originally used for safety, can be adapted to address security concerns in safety-critical systems, demonstrated through a medical domain example.

Contribution

It extends the application of validation obligations to security requirements, showing their usefulness beyond safety in formal system development.

Findings

Validation obligations can be applied to security concerns.

The approach helps ensure requirement consistency and completeness.

Demonstrated effectiveness in a medical system example.

Abstract

Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early in development to ensure their correctness. Furthermore, validation obligations help hold requirements consistent in an evolving model and create assurances about the model's completeness. Although initially proposed for safety properties, this paper shows how the technique of validation obligations enables us to also reason about security concerns through an example from the medical domain.