Model Driven Security: From UML models to access control infrastructures

We present a new approach to building secure systems. In our approach, which we call Model Driven Security, designers specify system models along with their security requirements and use tools to automatically generate system architectures from the models, including complete, configured access control infrastructures. Rather than fixing one particular modeling language for this process, we propose a general schema for constructing such languages that combines languages for modeling systems with languages for modeling security. We present several instances of this schema that combine ( both syntactically and semantically) different UML modeling languages with a security modeling language for formalizing access control requirements. From models in the combined languages, we automatically generate access control infrastructures for server-based applications, built from declarative and programmatic access control mechanisms. The modeling languages and generation process are semantically well-founded and are based on an extension of Role-Based Access Control. We have implemented this approach in a UML-based CASE-tool and report on experiments.