Security Assurance Cases (SAC) are a form of structured argumentation used to reason about the security properties of a system. After the successful adoption of assurance cases for safety, SACs are getting significant traction in recent years, especially in safety-critical industries (e.g., automotive), where there is an increasing pressure to be compliant with several security standards and regulations. Accordingly, research in the field of SAC has flourished in the past decade, with different approaches being investigated. In an effort to systematize this active field of research, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of the existing academic studies on SAC. Our review resulted in an in-depth analysis and comparison of 51 papers. Our results indicate that, while there are numerous papers discussing the importance of security assurance cases and their usage scenarios, the literature is still immature with respect to concrete support for practitioners on how to build and maintain a SAC. More importantly, even though some methodologies are available, their validation and tool support is still lacking.
Integrated safety and security assurance for complex systems is difficult for many technical and socio-technical reasons such as mismatched processes, inadequate information, differing use of language and philosophies, etc.. Many co-assurance techniques rely on disregarding some of these challenges in order to present a unified methodology. Even with this simplification, no methodology has been widely adopted primarily because this approach is unrealistic when met with the complexity of real-world system development. This paper presents an alternate approach by providing a Safety-Security Assu…
Assurance cases are structured arguments that are commonly used to reason about the safety of a product or service. Currently, there is an ongoing push towards using assurance cases for also cybersecurity, especially in safety-critical domains, like automotive. While the industry is faced with the challenge of defining a sound methodology to build security assurance cases, the state of the art is rather immature. Therefore, we have conducted a thorough investigation of the (external) constraints and (internal) needs that security assurance cases have to satisfy in the context of the automotive…
This paper proposes an implementation framework that lays out the ground for a coherent, systematic, and comprehensive approach to implement the National Information Assurance and Cyber Security Strategy (NIACSS) of Jordan. The Framework 1). Suggests a methodology to analyze the NIACSS, 2). Illustrates how the NIACSS analysis can be utilized to design strategic moves and develop an appropriate functional structure, and 3). proposes a set of adaptable strategic controls that govern the NIACSS implementation and allow achieving excellence, innovation, efficiency, and quality.The framework, if ad…
System security assurance provides the confidence that security features, practices, procedures, and architecture of software systems mediate and enforce the security policy and are resilient against security failure and attacks. Alongside the significant benefits of security assurance, the evolution of new information and communication technology (ICT) introduces new challenges regarding information protection. Security assurance methods based on the traditional tools, techniques, and procedures may fail to account new challenges due to poor requirement specifications, static nature, and poor…
Arguments about the safety, security, and correctness of a complex system are often made in the form of an assurance case. An assurance case is a structured argument, often represented with a graphical interface, that presents and supports claims about a system's behavior. The argument may combine different kinds of evidence to justify its top level claim. While assurance cases deliver some level of guarantee of a system's correctness, they lack the rigor that proofs from formal methods typically provide. Furthermore, changes in the structure of a model during development may result in inconsi…
Assurance cases are often required to certify critical systems. The use of formal methods in assurance can improve automation, increase confidence, and overcome errant reasoning. However, assurance cases can never be fully formalised, as the use of formal methods is contingent on models that are validated by informal processes. Consequently, assurance techniques should support both formal and informal artifacts, with explicated inferential links between them. In this paper, we contribute a formal machine-checked interactive language, called Isabelle/SACM, supporting the computer-assisted const…
The specification, design, and assurance of safety encompasses various concepts and best practices, subject of reuse in form of patterns. This work summarizes applied research on such concepts and practices with a focus on the last two decades and on the state-of-the-art of patterns in safety-critical system design and assurance argumentation. We investigate several aspects of such patterns, for example, where and when they are applied, their characteristics and purposes, and how they are related. For each aspect, we provide an overview of relevant studies and synthesize a taxonomy of first pr…
Pushed by market forces, software development has become fast-paced. As a consequence, modern development projects are assembled from 3rd-party components. Security & privacy assurance techniques once designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes taking place within a week, and happening in sub-components that are controlled by third-party developers one might not even know they existed. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the current software security approaches and evaluate their appropriateness in the face of the change…
Assurance cases are often required as a means to certify a critical system. Use of formal methods in assurance can improve automation, and overcome problems with ambiguity, faulty reasoning, and inadequate evidentiary support. However, assurance cases can rarely be fully formalised, as the use of formal methods is contingent on models validated by informal processes. Consequently, we need assurance techniques that support both formal and informal artifacts, with explicated inferential links and assumptions that can be checked by evaluation. Our contribution is a mechanical framework for develo…
Safety-critical software systems are those whose failure or malfunction could result in casualty and/or serious financial loss. In such systems, safety assurance cases (SACs) are an emerging approach that adopts a proactive strategy to produce structuralized safety justifications and arguments. While SACs are recommended in many software-intensive safety-critical domains, the lack of knowledge regarding the practitioners' perspectives on using SACs hinders effective adoption of this approach. To gain such knowledge, we interviewed nine practitioners and safety experts who focused on safety-cri…
Dependability assurance of systems embedding machine learning(ML) components---so called learning-enabled systems (LESs)---is a key step for their use in safety-critical applications. In emerging standardization and guidance efforts, there is a growing consensus in the value of using assurance cases for that purpose. This paper develops a quantitative notion of assurance that an LES is dependable, as a core component of its assurance case, also extending our prior work that applied to ML components. Specifically, we characterize LES assurance in the form of assurance measures: a probabilistic …
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) is a popular quality assurance technique in software engineering. However, integrating SAST tools into industry-level product development and security assessment poses various technical and managerial challenges. In this work, we reported a longitudinal case study of adopting SAST as a part of a human-driven security assessment for an open-source e-government project. We described how SASTs are selected, evaluated, and combined into a novel approach for software security assessment. The approach was preliminarily evaluated using semi-structured interv…
This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. This report is Part 2 and discusses: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and G…
This report provides an introduction and overview of the Technical Topic Notes (TTNs) produced in the Towards Identifying and closing Gaps in Assurance of autonomous Road vehicleS (Tigars) project. These notes aim to support the development and evaluation of autonomous vehicles. Part 1 addresses: Assurance-overview and issues, Resilience and Safety Requirements, Open Systems Perspective and Formal Verification and Static Analysis of ML Systems. Part 2: Simulation and Dynamic Testing, Defence in Depth and Diversity, Security-Informed Safety Analysis, Standards and Guidelines.
We investigate the feasibility of using a classifier for security-related requirements trained on requirement specifications available online. This is helpful in case different requirement types are not differentiated in a large existing requirement specification. Our work is motivated by the need to identify security requirements for the creation of security assurance cases that become a necessity for many organizations with new and upcoming standards like GDPR and HiPAA. We base our investigation on ten requirement specifications, randomly selected from a Google Search and partially pre-labe…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Optus Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub（Optus麦考瑞大学网络安全中心）；Kyushu University（九州大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；NVIDIA AI Tech Centre（英伟达人工智能技术中心）
Over the past decades, deep learning (DL) systems have achieved tremendous success and gained great popularity in various applications, such as intelligent machines, image processing, speech processing, and medical diagnostics. Deep neural networks are the key driving force behind its recent success, but still seem to be a magic black box lacking interpretability and understanding. This brings up many open safety and security issues with enormous and urgent demands on rigorous methodologies and engineering practice for quality enhancement. A plethora of studies have shown that the state-of-the…
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；Defence Science and Technology Laboratory（国防科学技术实验室）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) components embedded in autonomous systems -- so-called Learning-Enabled Systems (LESs) -- has resulted in the pressing need to assure their functional safety. As for traditional functional safety, the emerging consensus within both, industry and academia, is to use assurance cases for this purpose. Typically assurance cases support claims of reliability in support of safety, and can be viewed as a structured way of organising arguments and evidence generated from safety analysis and reliability modelling activities. While such assurance activities ar…
The cloud computing model is rapidly transforming the IT landscape. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm that delivers computing resources as a set of reliable and scalable internet-based services allowing customers to remotely run and manage these services. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is one of the popular cloud computing services. IaaS allows customers to increase their computing resources on the fly without investing in new hardware. IaaS adapts virtualization to enable on-demand access to a pool of virtual computing resources. Although there are great benefits to be gained fr…
SkillProbe: Security Auditing for Emerging Agent Skill Marketplaces via Multi-Agent Collaboration
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究所）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
In its Vision and Strategy for Software for Science, Engineering, and Education the NSF states that it will invest in activities that: "Recognize that software strategies must include the secure and reliable deployment and operation of services, for example by campuses or national facilities or industry, where identity, authentication, authorization and assurance are crucial operational capabilities." and "Result in high-quality, usable, secure, vulnerability-free, sustainable, robust, well-tested, and maintainable/evolvable software; and which promotes the sustainability of solid and useful o…
