Secure Data-Flow Compliance Checks between Models and Code based on Automated Mappings (Summary)

Abstract

We present our paper published at the 2019 edition of the International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS). During the development of security-critical software, the system implementation must capture the security properties postulated by the architectural design. To iteratively guide the developer in discovering such compliance violations we introduce automated mappings. These mappings are created by searching for correspondences between a design-level model (Security Data Flow Diagram) and an implementation-level model (Program Model). We limit the search space by considering name similarities between model elements and code elements as well as by the use of heuristic rules for matching data-flow structures. The automated mappings support the designer in an early discovery of implementation absence, convergence, and divergence with respect to the planned software design as well as the discovery of secure data-flow compliance violations. We provide a publicly available implementation of the approach and its evaluation on five open source Java projects.