Modeling Secure Architectural Connector with UML 2.0

Security is one of the most important quality attributes in software architecture. Previous modeling approaches provide insufficient support for an in-depth treatment of security. They lack the ability to model important security concepts. Also they are based on formal syntaxes such as using ADLs. This paper presents a more comprehensive treatment of an important security aspect, access control, at the architecture level. Our approach models security user, role, permission, two many-to-many relations for assigning a role to user and permission to role, and policy of architectural constituents. We base our new modeling language on UML 2.0 and try to model security concepts by extending UML. We also provide mechanisms for checking UML models to detect architectural vulnerabilities and assure correct access control at an early design stage.