Challenges in Secure Software Evolution - The Role of Software Architecture

Achieving quality properties for software systems and maintaining them during evolution is challenging. Especially, security properties often degrade during software evolution. This is often not noticed and can lead to monetary loss and serious damage to the company’s image. Approaches for maintaining security properties exist but fail to exploit the knowledge of the architectural design phase. This results in high effort and slow reactions on evolutionary changes. In this paper, we describe five key challenges in maintaining security properties during software evolution and show how architecture supports mastering them.