HARM: Hacker Attack Representation Method

Abstract

Current security requirements engineering methods tend to take an atomic and single-perspective view on attacks, treating them as threats, vulnerabilities or weaknesses from which security requirements can be derived. This approach may cloud the big picture of how many smaller weaknesses in a system contribute to an overall security flaw. The proposed Hacker Attack Representation Method (HARM) combines well-known and recently developed security modeling techniques in order represent complex and creative hacker attacks diagrammatically from multiple perspectives. The purpose is to facilitate overviews of intrusions on a general level and to make it possible to involve different stakeholder groups in the process, including non-technical people who prefer simple, informal representations. The method is tied together by a meta model. Both the method and the meta model are illustrated with a security attack reported in the literature.