Security requirements engineering is especially challenging because designers must consider not just the software under design but also interactions among people, organizations, hardware, and software. Taking this broader perspective means designing a secure socio-technical system rather than a merely technical system. This book presents a novel, model-driven approach to designing secure socio-technical systems. It introduces the Socio-Technical Modeling Language (STS-ML) and presents a freely available software tool, STS-Tool, that supports this design approach through graphical modeling, automated reasoning capabilities to verify the models constructed, and the automatic derivation of security requirements documents.

After an introduction to security requirements engineering and an overview of computer and information security, the book presents the STS-ML modeling language, introducing the modeling concepts used, explaining how to use STS-ML within the STS method for security requirements, and providing guidelines for the creation of models. The book then puts the STS approach into practice, introducing the STS-Tool and presenting two case studies from industry: an online collaborative platform and an e-Government system. Finally, the book considers other methods that can be used in conjunction with the STS method or that constitute an alternative to it. The book is suitable for course use or as a reference for practitioners. Exercises, review questions, and problems appear at the end of each chapter.

Information security concerns are becoming crucial in a society that increasingly relies on socio-technical systems, where humans and organizations live in cyberspaces governed by technology. How can designers be guided to understand security requirements? How can these be formulated as explicit design goals? How can development of complex socio-technical systems follow such requirements? No other book presently answers these questions. Thanks to the didactic effort of world-leading researchers, you can find a comprehensive set of answers in this book.

Carlo Ghezzi Professor of Software Engineering, Politecnico di Milano

Software-intensive systems do not operate in a vacuum: they are typically part of a social environment in which they affect and are affected by phenomena in the real world. This also means that such systems can be adversely affected by misuse—intentional or malicious—and, therefore, engineers increasingly carry the responsibility of developing systems that also address a range of security requirements, which also need to be understood, communicated, and subsequently, implemented. This book is a welcome and timely contribution to research and practice in this crucial area of engineering secure systems. Its focus on security requirements deals squarely with the challenge at source: the problem world, where assets, threats, and malicious agents reside.

Bashar Nuseibeh Professor of Computing, The Open University; Professor of Software Engineering, Lero