A Comparison of SecureUML and UMLsec for Role-based Access Control

Nowadays security has become an important aspect in information systems engineering. A mainstream method for information system security is Role-based Access Control (RBAC), which restricts system access to authorised users. Recently different authors have proposed a number of modelling languages (e.g., abuse cases, misuse cases, secure i*, secure Tropos, and KAOS extensions to security) that facilitate the documentation and analysis of security aspects. However it is unclear if these languages support the full spectrum of RBAC specification needs. In this paper we selected two security modelling languages, namely SecureUML and UMLsec. Based on the literature study and on the running example we systematically investigate how these languages could be used for RBAC. Our observations indicate that, although both approaches originate from the de-facto industry standard UML, they are not competitors. Rather they complement each other: SecureUML helps defining static RBAC aspects; UMLsec is recommended for dynamic RBAC analysis. Hopefully our study will help practitioners to understand these two approaches better, especially when selecting them for modelling purposes. We also believe that the combination of both approaches would ease secure information system development.

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