Data Validation Constraints in MDE

Software security encompasses all the measures taken to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability in software systems. In present-day software development, security is often just an afterthought rather than part of the software development life-cycle. In order to reveal potential security flaws before a software system is actually implemented, security aspects should be taken into account starting from the early phases of the development. With Model-Driven Engineering gaining momentum in both academia and industry, an interesting challenge is the specification of security constraints within software models. In this paper we focus on data validation – the process of ensuring that a system operates on correct and meaningful data – in the MDE context. Our contribution is a formal approach to the specification of data validation constraints which involve multiple structural features. In addition, we map constraints specified at the model level to Java annotations which are then transformed to executable tests by an existing data validation framework.