Meeting Real Challenges in Eliciting Security Attributes for Mobile Application Development

Abstract

There has been a rapid growth in the development of mobile application resulting from its wide usage for online transaction, data storage and exchange of information. However, an important issue that has been overlooked is the lack of emphasis on the security issues at the early stage of the development. In fact, security issues have been kept until the later stage of the implementation of mobile apps. Requirements engineers frequently ignore and incorrectly elicit security‐related requirements at the early stage of mobile application development. This scenario has led to the failure of developing secure and safe mobile application based on the needs of the users. As such, this paper intends to provide further understanding of the real challenges in extracting security attributes for mobile application faced by novice requirements engineers. For this purpose, two experiments on eliciting security attributes requirements of textual requirements scenario were conducted. The performance related to the correctness and time taken to elicit the security attributes were measured and recorded. It was found that the process of eliciting correct security attributes for mobile application requires effort, knowledge and skills. The findings indicate that an automated tool for correct elicitation security attributes requirement could help to overcome the challenges in eliciting security attributes requirements, especially among novice requirements engineers.