Core Security Requirements Artefacts

Although security requirements engineering has recently attracted increasing attention, it has lacked a context in which to operate. A number of papers have described how security requirements may be violated, but apart from a few hints in the general literature, none have described satisfactorily what security requirements are. This paper proposes a framework of core security requirements artefacts, which unifies the concepts of the two disciplines of requirements engineering and security engineering. From requirements engineering it takes the concept of functional goals, which are operationalised into functional requirements, with appropriate constraints. From security engineering it takes the concept of assets, together with threats of harm to those assets. Security goals aim to protect from those threats, and are operationalised into security requirements, which take the form of constraints on the functional requirements. In addition we explore the consequences of the fact that security is concerned with the protection of assets, while computers only provide interfaces. We show how to specify the relationship between security requirements and the specification of software behaviour, using Jackson's Problem Frames approach.