Verification of the Instantiation and Integration of Security Patterns

Authors

  • Tu Peng School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
  • Shuliang Wang School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
  • Jing Geng School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China
  • Qinsi Wang Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
  • Yun Yang School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia 3122
  • Kang Zhang Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.19347

Keywords:

Software engineering, software safety, software verification

Abstract

As software applications suffer from increasing malicious attacks, security becomes a critically important issue for software development. To avoid security problems and increase efficiency, a large software system design may reuse good security solutions for existing security patterns. While security patterns document expert solutions to common security problems and capture well-examined practices on secure software design, implementing them in a particular context (pattern instantiation) and composing them with other related patterns (pattern integration) are prone to flaws and may break expected security properties. In this paper, we present an approach to verify security patterns instantiation and integration automatically. We offer formal definitions for security pattern instantiation and integration, and establish rules to transform sequence diagrams (representing the behaviors of security patterns) to expressions in Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). We prove the correctness of the proposed transformation, and propose an algorithm to carry out this transformation automatically. In particular, we formally specify the alternative flows of UML sequence diagrams guarded by constraint conditions, which allows us to model choice making behaviors of security patterns precisely. The properties of the instantiation and integration can be verified by model checking against their CCS expressions. Flaws of instantiation and integration can, therefore, be discovered early in the design stage. We use two case studies to illustrate our approach and show the capability to prove security in integration and detect design errors in instantiation respectively.

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Author Biographies

Tu Peng, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

Tu Peng received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics from Peking University, China; and Ph.D. degree in Software Engineer from University of Texas at Dallas, USA. He is currently an associate professor in school of computer science, Beijing Institute of Technology. His research interests include software testing, verification, architecture and machine learning.

Shuliang Wang, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

Shuliang Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Wuhan University, China. He is currently a professor in Beijing Institute of Technology, China. His research interests include spatial data mining, and software engineering. For his innovatory study of spatial data mining, he was awarded the Fifth Annual InfoSciÒ-Journals Excellence in Research Awards of IGI Global, and one of the best national thesis in China.

Jing Geng, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

Jing Geng received her B.Eng. degree in Software Engineer from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; and Ph.D. degree in Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing from WuHan University, China. She is currently an assistant research fellow in Beijing Institute of Technology. Her research interests include spatial data mining, Geospatial knowledge service.

Qinsi Wang, Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Qinsi Wang is an independent postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Jean Yang at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Computer Science at CMU under the supervision of Prof. Edmund M. Clarke (Turing Award 2007) in Sep 2016. Her research interest is to develop formal specification and verification techniques for real-world systems with the emphasis on statistical model checking for models of biological signaling networks, stochastic SMT-based methods for stochastic hybrid systems, and combining model checking techniques with machine learning methods for the study of biological systems and causal networks.

Yun Yang, School of Software and Electrical Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology, PO Box 218, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Australia 3122

Yun Yang is part of the Swinburne University School of Software and Electrical Engineering. His research expertise spans areas including cloud computing, workflows, distributed systems, software development environments and service-oriented computing. Alongside his teaching and research responsibilities, Professor Yang is also the leader of Swinburne’s Next Generation Software Platform focus area and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.

Kang Zhang, Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX 75083, USA

Kang Zhang received his B.Eng. degree in Computer Engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Brighton, UK. He is currently a professor in department of computer science, the University of Texas at Dallas, USA.

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Published

2020-08-20

How to Cite

Peng, T., Wang, S., Geng, J., Wang, Q., Yang, Y., & Zhang, K. (2020). Verification of the Instantiation and Integration of Security Patterns. Journal of Web Engineering, 19(3-4), 521–556. https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.19347

Issue

Section

Advanced Practice in Web Engineering