Elicitation of SME requirements for cybersecurity solutions by studying adherence to recommendations

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have become the weak spot of our economy for cyber attacks. These companies are large in number and often do not have the controls in place to prevent successful attacks, respectively are not prepared to systematically manage their cybersecurity capabilities. [Question/problem] One of the reasons for why many SME do not adopt cybersecurity is that developers of cybersecurity solutions understand little the SME context and the requirements for successful use of these solutions. [Principal ideas/results] We elicit requirements by studying how cybersecurity experts provide advice to SME. The experts' recommendations offer insights into what important capabilities of the solution are and how these capabilities ought to be used for mitigating cybersecurity threats. The adoption of a recommendation hints at a correct match of the solution, hence successful consideration of requirements. Abandoned recommendations point to a misalignment that can be used as a source to inquire missed requirements. Re-occurrence of adoption or abandonment decisions corroborate the presence of requirements. [Contributions] This poster describes the challenges of SME regarding cybersecurity and introduces our proposed approach to elicit requirements for cybersecurity solutions. The poster describes CYSEC, our tool used to capture cybersecurity advice and help to scale cybersecurity requirements elicitation to a large number of participating SME. We conclude by outlining the planned research to develop and validate CYSEC1