Applicability Of Security Patterns

Information Security has become one of the fundamental mainstays in organizations owing to the ever-increasing cyber attacks against them in recent years. Both the designers of security mechanisms and the security engineers therefore need reliable security solutions to minimize the impact of the attacks on an organization's systems. Good mechanisms for solving these deficiencies are security patterns, which present a reliable and tested scheme to deal with recurring security problems. In this paper, we perform an analysis of some of the most important works that describe security patterns. Our main objective is to verify their applicability for the analysis and design of secure architectures in real and complex environments. Finally, and after presenting the detected shortcomings of the existing security patterns, we show which features should be incorporated into the patterns to be applicable in the field of information security engineering related to the development of secure architectures.