Security Requirements Formalization with RQCODE

Security requirements vary in nature and form. These requirements may come from compliance checklists, implementation guidelines, corporate standards, and reports from organizations such as NIST, MITRE, and OWASP. Stakeholders may express additional requirements, depending on the context, to address threats and vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. Requirements are usually expressed in natural language, sometimes accompanied by tests, fixes, or descriptions of attack vectors. Analyzing, managing, verifying, validating, and tracing the requirements are therefore challenging as it relies heavily on human activity. Formalizing requirements for automated analysis and reuse can help to reduce human error-prone activities. Seamless Object-Oriented Requirement (SOOR) promotes a paradigm of multi-requirement views. In this paradigm, requirements are classes described in an object-oriented programming (OOP) language that combines representations in natural language with those in formal languages, such as LTL or Eiffel. The embedded formal language representations can provide means for validating requirements. In addition, the major advantage is that OOP supports seamless reuse of requirements classes and extensions through inheritance or associations. RQCODE is a novel approach based firstly on the implementation of SOOR in Java, and secondly on the applicability of SOOR to security requirements. This is done while providing a lightweight formalization through the associated tests that validate and strengthen system security according to the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG). We argue that this approach, also known as RQCODE, offers several advantages for formalizing, reusing, analyzing, and validating security requirements by automated means. In this chapter, we discuss the challenges of requirements specification in the cybersecurity domain and present our RQCODE approach.