Assessing and Communicating Software Security: Enhancing Software Product Health with Architectural Threat Analysis

Abstract

Assessing and communicating software security has become a crucial concern in the era of digital transformation. As software systems grow more complex and interconnected, it becomes increasingly challenging to effectively evaluate and communicate a product's security status to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. The Software Product Health Assistant (SPHA) is designed to automatically collect and aggregate data from existing expert tools and derive, among other scores, a transparent Security Score. SPHA is designed to present and explain this Security Score to decision-makers to support their responsibilities. In this paper, we demonstrate how to integrate data from SMARAGD (System Modeler for Architectural Risk Assessment and Guidance on Defenses), a safety-informed threat modeling tool, into SPHA to enhance the existing definition of its Security Score. To achieve this, we combine information about known vulnerabilities with architectural and threat data to calculate a realistic risk score for the product in question.

Keywords: Quantifying Cybersecurity Risk, Threat Modeling, Risk Assessment, Security Metrics

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006145