Security and Privacy Requirements Analysis within a Social Setting

Security issues for software systems ultimately concern relationships among social actors stakeholders, system users, potential attackers and the software acting on their behalf. This paper proposes a methodological framework for dealing with security and privacy requirements based on i*, an agent-oriented requirements modeling language. The framework supports a set of analysis techniques. In particular, attacker analysis helps identify potential system abusers and their malicious intents. Dependency vulnerability analysis helps detect vulnerabilities in terms of organizational relationships among stakeholders. Countermeasure analysis supports the dynamic decisionmaking process of defensive system players in addressing vulnerabilities and threats. Finally, access control analysis bridges the gap between security requirement models and security implementation models. The framework is illustrated with an example involving security and privacy concerns in the design of agentbased health information systems. In addition, we discuss model evaluation techniques, including qualitative goal model analysis and property verification techniques based on model checking.