Designing secure systems based on open architectures with open source and closed source components

Abstract

The development and evolution of secure open architecture systems has received insufficient consideration. Such systems are composed of both open source and closed software software components subject to different security requirements in an architecture in which evolution can occur by evolving existing components, replacing them, or refactoring their interfaces, interconnections and configuration. But this may result in possible security requirements conflicts and organizational liability for failure to fulfill security obligations. We are developing an approach for understanding and modeling software security requirements as security licenses, as well as for analyzing conflicts among groups of such licenses in realistic system contexts and for guiding the acquisition, integration, or development of systems with open source components in such an environment. Consequently, this paper reports on our efforts to extend our existing approach to specifying and analyzing software Intellectual Property (IP) licenses to now address software security licenses that can be associated with secure OA systems. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.