Introducing mitigation use cases to enhance the scope of test cases

Abstract

Gathering security-related requirements and designing dependable software is difficult. Even though software security has become one of the main challenge of software development and security issues are taken increasingly into account in software companies, the security viewpoint is typically loosely integrated in developers routines and development processes. This paper presents results from an experiment where use case, misuse case and mitigation use case descriptions were used to generate test cases for the system. This helps integrating the security characteristics into the product already in the first phases of development. By defining the misuse cases and planning corresponding mitigations help developers to build the security characteristics right into the product, because security is addressed throughout the development from the requirements phase to the testing phase. We suggest some enhancements to the misuse case approach to help developers identify security requirements more carefully. Furthermore, we present a procedure for generating test cases from the mitigations in order to ensure that security targets have been achieved. Results from our experiments indicate that the approach improves the process of producing relevant test cases. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.