Hardening Systems Against Data Corruption Attacks at Design Time

Despite advancements in security research, systems continue to be susceptible to all kinds of threats. To better support designers, we present a method and tool called Dubhe that can be employed during the design phase of development to harden systems against data corruption attacks. We highlight the benefits of this approach by applying it to an online seller of merchandise system to analyze various “what-if” scenarios with different defence objectives. Using our approach, Dubhe (1) analyzes the XML form of UML activity diagrams created to define the behavioural view of the system, (2) determines optimal locations for data sanitization using novel protection techniques and activity centrality concepts, and (3) communicates the results to the designers so that they can incorporate the suggestions back into their system designs. This example application of Dubhe shows that our approach can provide valuable security advice to designers to ensure that their systems are designed with protection against data corruption attacks, using only artifacts that designers would normally create during the design phase.