Automated Risk Management Based Software Security Vulnerabilities Management

Abstract

An automated risk assessment approach is explored in this work. The focus is to optimize the conventional threat modeling approach to explore software system vulnerabilities. Data produced in the software development processes are better leveraged using Machine Learning approaches. A large amount of industry knowledge around security vulnerabilities can be leveraged to enhance current threat modeling approaches. Work done here is in the ecosystem of software development processes that use Agile methodology. Insurance business domain data are explored as a target for this study. The focus is to enhance the traditional threat modeling approach with a better quantitative approach and reduce the biases introduced by the people who are part of software development processes. This effort will help bridge multiple data sources prevalent across the software development ecosystem. Bringing these various data sources together will assist in understanding patterns associated with security aspects of the software systems. This perspective further helps to understand and devise better controls. Approaches explored so far have considered individual areas of software development and their influence on improving security. There is a need to build an integrated approach for a total security solution for the software systems. A wide variety of machine learning approaches and ensemble approaches will be explored. The insurance business domain is considered for the research here. CWE (Common Weaknesses Enumeration) mapping from industry knowledge are leveraged to validate the security needs from the industry perspective. This combination of industry and company data will help get a holistic picture of the software system’s security. Combining the industry and company data helps lay down the path for an integrated security management system in software development. The risk management framework with the quantitative threat modeling process is the work’s uniqueness. This work contributes toward making the software systems secure and robust with time.

Keywords

• Quantitative threat modeling
• software security
• machine learning
• quantitative risk assessment
• integrated security management system