UML Design with Security Integration as First Class Citizen

Security for software applications involves defining what needs to be protected (security policy), authorizing privileges of the application to users, authenticating application users, and providing a high degree of security assurance in regards to the access of users to the application. To address security during software design/development, our previous work has proposed a model to incorporate role-based access control (RBAC) and mandatory access control (MAC) into the unified modeling language (UML) to support the definition of security for software applications. Included in this work is a series of design-time checks that insure that the defined RBAC/MAC security is always consistent as a UML design with security properties is created and modified. In this paper, we extend this effort by proposing a formal model that combines typed logic with active database language concepts in order to support the checking of constraints during design-time (as UML diagrams are created and modified) and postdesign (for the entire UML design that represents a version) towards the attainment of security assurance. To demonstrate the feasibility and utility of our work on secure software design, our RBAC/MAC enhancements and the constraint checking has been integrated into Borland's UML tool Together Control Center.