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Supporting Requirements Engineers in Recognising Security Issues

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6606))

Abstract

Context & motivation: More and more software projects today are security-related in one way or the other. Many environments are initially not considered security-related and no security experts are assigned. Requirements engineers often fail to recognise indicators for security problems. Question/problem: Ignoring security issues early in a project is a major source of recurring security problems in practice. Identifying security-relevant requirements is labour-intensive and error-prone. Security may be neglected in order to finish on time and in budget. Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a tool-supported method that provides assistance for requirements engineering, with an emphasis on security requirements. We investigate whether security-relevant requirements can be automatically identified using a Bayesian classifier. Our results indicate that this is feasible, in particular if the classifier is trained with domain specific data and documents from previous projects. Contribution: We show how the ability to identify security-relevant requirements can be integrated in a workflow of requirements analysis and reuse of experience. In practice, this can increase security awareness within the software development process. We discuss limitations and potential of this approach.

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Knauss, E., Houmb, S., Schneider, K., Islam, S., Jürjens, J. (2011). Supporting Requirements Engineers in Recognising Security Issues. In: Berry, D., Franch, X. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6606. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19858-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19858-8_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19857-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19858-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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