Designing Security Requirements - A Flexible, Balanced, and Threshold-Based Approach

Defining security requirements is the important first step in designing, implementing and evaluating a secure system. In this paper, we propose a formal approach for designing security requirements, which is flexible for a user to express his/her security requirements with different levels of details and for the system developers to take different options to design and implement the system to satisfy the user’s requirements. The proposed approach also allows the user to balance the required system security properties and some unfavorable features (e.g., performance degrading due to tight control and strong security). Given the importance of social-technical factors in information security, the proposed approach also incorporates economic and organizational security management factors in specifying user’s security requirements. We demonstrate the application of our approach with the help of a concrete pervasive information system.