The International Arab Journal of Information Technology (IAJIT)

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Representing Access Control Policies in Use Cases Khaled Alghathbar

 Security  requirements  of  a  software  product  need  to   receive  attention  throughout  its  development  lifecycle.  This  paper  proposes  the  required  notation  and  format  to  represent  security  requirements,  especially  access control  policies  in  use  case  diagram  and  use  case  description.  Such  enhance ments  offer  simple  representation  for  positive  and negative  authorization,  grouping  sensitive  use  cases  that  fo rm  a  critical  business  task,  separation  of  duties  –  both  static  and  dynamic,  least  privilege,  inheritance  of  authorizations,  and   security  state  or  label  for  data  inputted,  stored or  outputted.  Validating  information flow requirements at an early stage pre vents costly fixes that are mandated during later stages of the development  life cycle.   


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[26] Warmer J. and Kleppe A., The Object Constraint Language: Precise Modeling with UML , Addison Wesley, 1999. Khaled Alghathbar PhD, CISSP, CISM, PMP, BS7799 Lead Auditor, is an associate professor and the director of the Centre of Excellence in Information Assurance in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia. He is a security advisor for several government agencies. His main research interest is in information security management, policies and desig n. He received his PhD in Information Technology from George Mason University, USA.