Usability of Security Specification Approaches for UML Design: A Survey

Since it is the de facto language for software specification and design, UML is the target language used by almost all state of the art contributions handling security at specification and design level. However, these contributions differ in the covered security requirements, specification approaches, verification tools, etc. This paper investigates the main approaches adopted for specifying and enforcing security at UML design and surveys the related state of the art. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion of these approaches from usability viewpoint. A set of criteria has been defined and used in this usability discussion. The discussed UML approaches are stereotypes and tagged values, OCL, and behavior diagrams. Extending the UML meta-language or creating new meta-languages for security specification are also covered by this study.