An Aspect-Oriented Approach for Software Security Hardening: from Design to Implementation

Security plays a predominant role in software engineering. Enforcing security policies should be considered during the early stages of the software development lifecycle to prevent security breaches in the final products. Because of the pervasive nature of security, integrating security solutions at the software design level may result in the scattering and tangling of security concerns throughout the entire design. To tackle this problem, we propose in this paper a new approach of representing and enforcing the hardening solutions based on aspect-orientation. This new approach provides software designers with UML-based capabilities to perform security hardening in a systematic and organized way, from design to implementation, without the need to have extensive security expertise. We also present SHP profile, a UML-based security hardening language to describe and specify security hardening solutions at the UML design level. Finally, we illustrate the applicability and the relevance of our approach through a real case study.