Description
Effective system development relies on making well-considered design
choices, which can profoundly shape the security posture of a system. To
avoid the high costs associated with addressing security vulnerabilities
at later stages, it is essential to incorporate security considerations
into the architectural phase. This paper introduces an efficient
approach to assessing the impact of architectural decisions. It presents
a conceptual model that evaluates the security aspects of a system
architecture. This model defines a method for describing an architecture
from a security perspective and establishes a scoring system for
evaluating these architecture descriptions. These scores reflect the
susceptibility of individual components within the architecture to
potential compromises. Both the architectural description and scoring
system are integrated into a tool that analyzes potential attack paths,
considering various attack steps, to compute these scores. This
conceptual model offers substantial benefits in the manufacturing
process by enabling the early identification and resolution of potential
security issues.
|
Thesis topic in co-operation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security AISEC, Garching