Supporting Common Criteria Security Analysis with Problem Frames

Software vendors have to build their customers’ trust through appropriate security functionalities of their products. The Common Criteria (ISO 15408) security standard provides an evaluation process for a software product, the application of which results in a set of documents that can be reviewed by a certification body. Creating this comprehensible set of documents is difficult, due to a detailed threat analysis, security objectives elicitation, and a selection and implementation of appropriate security measures. Moreover, the descriptions of what to do in the document are given in ambiguous natural language. We propose a model-driven approach for Common Criteria threat analysis and the subsequent security analysis based on the problem frames security requirements engineering method. Our method contains a UML profile that aligns the problem frames and Common Criteria concepts and terminology. Furthermore, we provide OCL checks for these models for consistency and reasoning support. In addition, our tool support contains a functionality to transform the information stored in UML models to natural language texts in LaTeX and HTML format. We illustrate the application of our approach for a smart grid example based on a published Common Criteria protection profile.