A Vulnerability Metric for the Design Phase of Object Oriented Software

Unlike quality, quantitative estimation of security at design phase of object oriented software is largely missing. The work examines that coupling is one of the object oriented design characteristic responsible for propagation of vulnerabilities in the design of software. A metric is proposed to determine whether the design of one version of a software system is more vulnerable than another with respect to propagation of vulnerability. Unlike, counting bugs at the code level or counting vulnerability reports at system level, the proposed metric measures the overall propagation of vulnerabilities in an object oriented design.