Formalized aspect-oriented misuse case for specifying crosscutting security threats and mitigations

Shumaila Iqbal, Rizwan Bin Faiz, Muhammad Usman and Shafiq ur Rehman

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 9, 1-40

Abstract: Software applications are essential for managing daily life activities, including social interactions and business transactions, that significantly increase the need for security in sharing sensitive information. Misuse case modeling is used for identifying and analyzing security requirements in software applications. However, security threats and their corresponding mitigations are inherently cross-cutting concerns. These concerns are scattered and tangled within multiple functional requirements and cannot be modularized using traditional object-oriented techniques. The realization of misuse cases causes crosscutting threats and corresponding mitigations to be scattered and tangled across use cases, resulting in ambiguity, incomplete understanding, and insufficient analysis of security requirements. This study proposes a misuse case modelling method called Aspect-oriented Formalized Misuse Case (AFMUC). It specifies crosscutting security threats separately as an aspect misuse case and integrates them with use cases using an aspect-oriented approach. AFMUC provides structured guidelines and restriction rules for modeling crosscutting security threats and corresponding mitigations using aspect-oriented constructs such as Pointcut, Joinpoint Advice, and Introduction. The aspect threat model is then woven into the base use case model. Similarly, an aspect mitigation model is proposed to specify crosscutting mitigations following the AFMUC restriction rules. The aspect mitigation model is then woven into the base misuse case model. The proposed approach is applied to a case study and evaluated through a controlled experiment involving twenty-four students with a background in information security. The findings indicate that the AFMUC approach is practical and unambiguous for specifying and analyzing crosscutting security requirements. However, some aspect-oriented modeling constructs and restriction rules have been misapplied by students. This shows that while students favored the AFMUC approach, they may have found it challenging to apply the aspect-oriented constructs and restriction rules due to a limited exposure to aspect-oriented modelling.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0322664

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322664

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