An anti-pattern for misuse cases

Abstract

Misuse case analysis is a method for the elicitation, documentation, and communication of security requirements. It builds upon the well-established use case analysis method and is one of the few existing techniques dedicated to security requirements engineering. We present an anti-pattern for applying misuse cases, dubbed “orphan misuses.” Orphan misuse cases by and large ignore the system at hand, thus providing little insight into its security. Common symptoms include implementation-dependent threats and overly general, vacuous mitigations. We illustrate orphan misuse cases through examples, explain their negative consequences in detail, and give guidelines for avoiding them.