Home // ICSEA 2015, The Tenth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances // View article
Authors:
Sajjad Mahmood
Muhammad Jalal Khan
Sajid Anwer
Keywords: security reference architecture; reference architecture; distributed systems; systematic mapping study
Abstract:
There is an increase in use of reference architectures to support software development activities for building distributed systems. Reference architectures are helpful tools to understand and specify functionalizes of a distributed system at a higher abstraction level. From a security standpoint, a distributed system’s reference architecture is one of the potential starting point to study security threats and their characteristics. Both academia and industry have proposed a number of Security Reference Architectures (SRAs), which are reference architectures specifying a conceptual model of security for a system and they provide a mechanism to specify security requirements. The main objective of this work is to investigate and better understand how security reference architecture support building secure distributed software applications. In order to meet our goal, we conducted a systematic mapping study to identify the primary studies related to SRA for distributed software development. We used customized search terms, derived from our research question, to identify literature on SRA for distributed systems. We identified that a significant number of SRAs have been developed first for defense against one or few specific types of security attacks. There is also a focus on developing SRAs to satisfy a security objective during development of distributed systems. Based on the systematic mapping study results, we suggest that there is a need to develop SRAs that help system developers simultaneously enumerate different types of security threats and systematically help to decide where we should add corresponding security patterns to mitigate them.
Pages: 363 to 368
Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015
Publication date: November 15, 2015
Published in: conference
ISSN: 2308-4235
ISBN: 978-1-61208-438-1
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Dates: from November 15, 2015 to November 20, 2015