Alternative Formats If You Require This Document in an Alternative Format, Please Contact: [email protected]
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Bath PHD Computational Verification of Security Requirements Bibu, Gideon Dadik Award date: 2014 Awarding institution: University of Bath Link to publication Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 07. Oct. 2021 Computational Verification of Security Requirements submitted by Gideon Dadik Bibu for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Bath Department of Computer Science September 2013 COPYRIGHT Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on the condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consulta- tion. Signature of Author . Gideon Dadik Bibu Abstract One of the reasons for persistence of information security challenges in organisa- tions is that security is usually seen as a technical problem. Hence the emphasis on technical solutions in practice. However, security challenges can also arise from people and processes. We therefore approach the problem of security in organisations from a socio-technical perspective and reason that the design of security requirements for organisations has to include procedures that would al- low for the design time analysis of the system behaviour with respect to security requirements. In this thesis we present a computational approach to the verification and valida- tion of elicited security requirements. This complements the existing approaches of security requirements elicitation by providing a computational means for rea- soning about security requirements at design time. Our methodology is centred on a deontic logic inspired institutional framework which provides a mechanism to monitor the permissions, empowerment, and obligations of actors and generates violations when a security breach occurs. We demonstrate the functionality of our approach by modelling a practical sce- nario from health care domain to explore how the institutional framework can be used to develop a model of a system of interacting actors using the action language InstAL. Through the application of the semantics of answer set pro- gramming (ASP), we demonstrate a way of carrying out verification of security requirements such that it is possible to predict the effect of certain actions and the causes of certain system states. To show that our approach works for a number of security requirements, we also use other scenarios to demonstrate the analysis of confidentiality and integrity requirements. From human factor point of view compliance determines the effectiveness of se- curity requirements. We demonstrate that our approach can be used for man- agement of security requirements compliance. By verifying compliance and pre- dicting non-compliance and its consequences at design time, requirements can be redesigned in such a way that better compliance can be achieved. i ii Acknowledgements It has been a long journey so far. I have heard it said several times that PhD is a long marathon which requires determination to stay motivated in addition to stamina and focus. Indeed it takes all these to weather through a PhD studies. With this said it is obvious that this feat could not have been achieved alone. I give thanks and praise to my Father in heaven, the Almighty God for making this possible all the way from the beginning to the end. It was almost an impossibility due to the funding problem but He came through at the right time. To Him alone be all the praise and glory. Special thanks to my wife Rahab for her support, encouragement and prayers. Also to our lovely and wonderful kids Retnyit, Zughumnan and Kwoopnan. Thank you for those prayers and encouragements that you always give. You are really blessings to us. Thank you for enduring all those evenings and week- ends when daddy has to be at work at the expense of your play time. God bless you and keep you. To my great, wonderful and amiable supervisors, Dr Julian Padget, Prof James Davenport and Dr Marina De Vos, I want to say a big thank you for the direction and pushing me to my limits in several ways. I am indeed better off in many ways than when I first met you. I salute Julian's patience as I tried to find my way round the concepts that have brought me to this point today. Thank you to James for his insight and constructive criticisms on security issues at the early stage of my work. Marina who had been unofficially provision some level of supervision even before she officially became my second-second supervisor, thank you for those once in a while thought baits you throw at me, especially with ASP and InstAL. I also want to thank Dr Tina Balke for helping out with InstAL i issues. Life in the PhD lab can be a rather boring time. Thanks to those who spice it up in many different ways. Particularly to Mesar Hameed thank you for those walk- out times and support with technical issues. To Saeid Pourroostaei Ardakani, Pawitra Chiravirakul, Zohreh Shams, Dr Fabio Nemetz and Dr Joao Duro my seat row mates thank you for your support. My research experience cannot be complete without the time I spent in NII, Japan. I want to acknowledge Professor Nobukazu Yoshioka for his great influence on my research. The time I spent working with him at NII helped me sharpen my research focus. I acknowledge NII for the opportunity. Thanks to my parents, siblings and in-laws for your prayers and encouragement. I thank friends in JKC Bath and the Olukus for their support and great measure of love. The Lord shall uphold you all in Jesus name. I specially acknowledge the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) Nigeria for sponsoring my study fully for three years. Without your funding, I would still have been dreaming about doing a PhD outside Nigeria. I also acknowledge other funding bodies including CISN hardship fund for the financial support granted to me towards the end of my studies. ii Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Security, Logic and Social Norms . .7 1.2 Security Goals . 11 1.3 Motivation and Scope . 13 1.4 Thesis Contribution . 15 1.5 Related Publications . 16 1.6 Thesis Outline . 17 2 Security Requirements Engineering: The Landscape 20 2.1 Introduction . 20 2.2 Security Requirements Engineering - Traditional Approaches . 23 2.2.1 Use Cases and Scenarios . 24 2.2.2 Misuse Case and Mal(icious)-activity Diagrams . 26 2.2.3 Abuse Cases and Anti-models . 29 2.3 Security Requirements Engineering: Multi-agent System Approaches 30 2.3.1 Secure i*........................... 30 2.3.2 Secure Tropos . 31 2.4 Summary of Chapter . 32 3 Modelling Organisations with Electronic Institutions 33 3.1 Introduction . 33 3.2 Organisations and Institutions . 35 3.3 Organisational Approaches . 36 3.3.1 OperA Framework . 37 3.3.2 OMNI . 38 3.3.3 MOISE+ . 40 iii 3.3.4 AGR . 42 3.3.5 O-MaSE . 42 3.4 Institutional approaches . 43 3.4.1 E-Institutions . 44 3.4.2 HarmonIA Framework . 45 3.5 Summary of models . 46 3.6 Institutional Frameworks . 47 3.6.1 Aspects of Institutional Specification . 49 3.6.1.1 Constitutive Aspects of Institutions . 51 3.6.1.2 Regulative Aspects of Institutions . 54 3.6.1.3 Institutional Framework Initiation and Termination 58 3.6.1.4 Time . 58 3.6.2 Formal Definition of Institutional Framework . 59 3.7 Summary of Chapter . 62 4 Computational Logic Reasoning Approaches 63 4.1 Introduction . 63 4.2 Answer Set Programming . 63 4.2.1 How ASP compares with similar formalisms . 65 4.2.1.1 ASP and SATISFIABILITY (SAT) solving: . 65 4.2.1.2 ASP and Prolog: . 66 4.2.2 AnsProlog ........................... 68 4.2.2.1 ASP Syntax . 68 4.2.2.2 Semantics of AnsP rolog? Programs . 73 4.2.3 Computational Complexity of ASP . 76 4.3 Reasoning about Specifications in ASP . 77 4.3.1 The Trace Program . 77 4.4 Other Reasoning Approaches . 80 4.4.1 Situation Calculus . 81 4.4.2 Event Calculus . 82 4.4.3 Action Languages . 84 4.4.4 Model Checking . 86 4.5 Institutional framework to ASP Translation . 88 4.5.1 Translation Based on Components . 89 iv 4.5.2 Summary of the Translations . 95 4.6 The Action Language InstAL .................... 97 4.6.1 Specifying Institutions in InstAL .............. 97 4.7 Summary of Chapter . 106 5 CVF: The Computational Verification Framework for Security Requirements 107 5.1 Introduction . 107 5.2 CVF: Computational Verification Framework .