Designing System Security with UML Misuse Deployment Diagrams

Useful enhancements to UML for security exist, including for the requirements and analysis/design stages: notably misuse case diagrams/descriptions, mis-sequence diagrams, UMLpac, and security patterns. These all consider security attacks on software functionality. This paper considers the system architecture when analyzing security. The advantage of the proposed misuse deployment diagram is that in distributed processing (e.g., client/server) where you put your defense software is as important as having it. This new diagram gives a bird's eye view of possible security attacks, and the security defenses or layers to mitigate them. This technique can be used in more than software development, since it may be used in audit, testing, security planning, and security education.