Refining Use/Misuse/Mitigation Use Cases for Security Requirements

Abstract

We investigate security at the same time as the functional requirements by refining and integrating use, misuse, and mitigation use cases. Security requirements rely on the interactions among normal system execution (use cases), attacks (misuse cases), and necessary security strategies (mitigation use cases), but previous approaches only use a high-level of abstraction. We use refinement to uncover details of each case and the relationships among them before integrating them. We identify and model “includes” and “extends” relationships within each refined case type, and use a condition-driven process that maintains these relationships as refinement continues. We then systematically identify and model “threatens” and “mitigates” relationships to integrate the cases at a detailed level.