Building Secure Systems Using a Security Engineering Process and Security Building Blocks

In today’s software development process, security related design decisions are rarely made early in the overall process. Even if security is considered early, this means that in most cases a more-or-less encompassing security requirements analysis is made. Based on this analysis best-practices, ad-hoc design decisions or individual expertise is used to integrate security during the development process or after weaknesses are found after the deployment. This paper explains the SecFutur security engineering process with a focus on Security Building Block Models which are used to build security related components, namely Security Building Blocks. These Security Building Blocks represent concrete security solutions and can be accessed via SecFutur patterns on the level of domain-specific models for particular application domains. The goal of this approach is to provide already defined and tested security related software components, which can be used early in the overall development process, to support security-design-decision already while modeling the software-system. Security Building Blocks are discussed in the context of the SecFutur Security Engineering Process with its requirement analysis and definition of security properties.