Unified modeling of attacks, vulnerabilities and security activities.

Security is becoming recognized as an important aspect of software development, leading to the development of many different security-enhancing techniques, many of which use some kind of custom modeling language. Models in these different languages cannot readily be related to each other, which is an obstacle to using several techniques together. The sheer number of languages is, in itself, also an obstacle to adoption by developers. In this paper we present a modeling language that can be used in place of four existing modeling languages: attack trees, vulnerability cause graphs, security activity graphs, and security goal indicator trees. Models in our language can be more precise than earlier models, which allows them to be used in automated applications, such as automatic testing and static analysis. Models in the new language can be derived automatically from models in the existing languages, and can be viewed using existing notation. Our modeling language exploits a data model, also presented in this paper, that permits rich interconnections between various items of security knowledge. In this data model it is straightforward to relate different kinds of models, and thereby different software security techniques, to each other.