Managing Security Requirements Conflicts in Socio-Technical Systems

Requirements are inherently prone to conflicts, for they originate from stakeholders with different, often opposite, needs. Security requirements are no exception. Importantly, their violation leads to severe effects, including privacy infringement, legal sanctions, and exposure to security attacks. Today’s systems are Socio-Technical Systems (STSs): they consist of autonomous participants (humans, organisations, software) that interact to get things done. In STSs, security is not just a technical challenge, but it needs to consider the social components of STSs too. We have previously proposed STS-ml, a security requirements modelling language for STSs that expresses security requirements as contractual constraints over the interactions among STS participants. In this paper, we build on top of STS-ml and propose a framework that, via automated reasoning techniques, supports the identification and management of conflicts in security requirements models. We apply our framework to a case study about e-Government, and report on promising scalability results of our implementation.