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Add terms trusted, untrusted, trustworthy
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It's best to define terms before using them, so this
adds explanations of these key terms.

Signed-off-by: David A. Wheeler <[email protected]>
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david-a-wheeler committed Apr 7, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -250,6 +250,8 @@ Requirements don’t even *have* to be written down to be used, especially for a

Of course, the actual requirements depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.

### Common Security Objectives

So how can you determine the security requirements for a particular system? One way to identify security requirements is to think about the common security objectives and supporting security functions we have *already* discussed and determine the specific requirements for your system in each category. In particular, think about how each one applies to the kind of information your program will manage. Let’s walk through each security objective and supporting security function, and discuss some things to consider:

1. **Confidentiality** (“No unauthorized read”)<br>Identify information that should not be publicly revealed, such as private information about people and systems. Who should be allowed to see that? Can you avoid having that information at all (since you cannot reveal what you do not have)? If you store password information so people can log in to your system (aka “inbound” authentication), you need to store this password information using special algorithms designed for it (such as Argon2id), as we will discuss later.
Expand All @@ -268,6 +270,8 @@ So how can you determine the security requirements for a particular system? One

7. **Auditing/Logging**<br>What information/events should you record? Typically you at least record login, logout, and important events like user account creation and deletion. Generally a system should record when something happened (date and time), what happened, what system component did it, and who caused it to happen.

#### Tips for Finding Security Requirements

You will sometimes see documents that use the security terms “subject” and “object”. A “subject” is something that acts (e.g., a user or process). An “object” is something being acted on (e.g., a file or network port).

Some developers capture some requirements as *use cases*. Each use case is a list of interactions between actor(s) and a system to achieve a goal. This has led to an interesting security approach, the development of *abuse cases* or *misuse cases*. An abuse case is a list of interactions between actors and a system that are intended to cause harm (e.g., to the system, actor(s), or stakeholders). A very similar term is “misuse case”, a description of a malicious act against a system. Many have found it useful to define abuse cases or misuse cases to then describe how the system must *counter* such abuse/misuse. By thinking about abuse and misuse, and figuring out how to counter them early, a lot of mischief can be prevented. Many developers find it hard to *think like an attacker*, so throughout this course we will focus on techniques to help you find vulnerabilities anyway, for example, by identifying common types of vulnerabilities and explaining how to systematically do threat modeling.
Expand All @@ -280,6 +284,19 @@ If you are looking for ideas for potential security requirements, one source is

**Finally:** If there is existing software that does something like the software you are developing, look at its security capabilities. They added those capabilities for a reason, and your software might need at least some of them as well.

#### Key terms: Trust, Trustworthy, and Untrusted

A *trustworthy* component is worthy of being trusted (for some purpose).

*Trust*, by contrast, is a *decision* to depend on something for some purpose.
You should only trust things that have adequate evidence of being trustworthy.
Security vulnerabilities occur when trust is given to something not
adequately trustworthy.

An *untrusted user* is a user you do not completely trust.
Any data from an untrusted user should be handled carefully, because an
untrusted user might be an attacker.

#### Quiz 1.2: Security Requirements

\>\>A typical requirement for an Internet-connected service is to stay available regardless of the attacks it undergoes. True or False?<<
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