Aligning service-oriented architectures with security requirements

Aligning requirements and architectures is a long-standing concern in software engineering. Alignment is crucial in the area of systems evolution, wherein requirements and system architectures keep changing after system deployment. We address a specific alignment problem, namely, checking the compliance of a service-oriented architecture-representing a composite service-with security requirements. Service-oriented architectures are dynamic (services can be replaced on-the-fly), and assessing compliance with security requirements is key, since non-compliance may lead to sanctions as well as privacy violation. After motivating and describing the problem, we propose algorithms to check two specific security requirements: non-disclosure and non-repudiation. We illustrate the approach using an e-government scenario. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.