Use of the Zachman Architecture for Security Engineering

A system security policy is often perceived as a set of mandatory requirements levied upon the system by an organizational directive or Information System Security Officer (ISSO). To the user, these security requirements may bear little resemblance to his actual working system security policy, which controls data modification and user privileges. In the course of reengineering business processes and information systems, the system modeling activities provide a unique opportunity: This paper presents a methodology for security policy definition using the Zachman information systems architecture as a tool. The system security policy can be extracted from the Zachman framework, providing a technique for reconciling the security policy as defined by directive with the user’s working system security requirements.