Information modeling for automated risk analysis

Systematic security risk analysis requires an information model which integrates the system design, the security environment (the attackers, security goals etc) and proposed security requirements. Such a model must be scalable to accommodate large systems, and support the efficient discovery of threat paths and the production of risk-based metrics; the modeling approach must balance complexity, scalability and expressiveness. This paper describes such a model; novel features include combining formal information modeling with informal requirements traceability to support the specification of security requirements on incompletely specified services, and the typing of information flow to quantify path exploitability and model communications security.