Identifying and Resolving Least Privilege Violations in Software Architectures

Security principles, like least privilege, are among the resources in the security body of knowledge that survived the test of time. The implementation of these principles in a software architecture is difficult, as there are no systematic rules on how to apply them in practice. As a result, they are often neglected, which lowers the overall security level of the software system and increases the cost necessary to fix this later in the development life-cycle. This paper improves the support for least privilege in software architectures by (i) defining the foundations to identify potential violations of the principle herein and (ii) elicitating architectural transformations that positively impact the security properties of the architecture, while preserving the semantics thereof. These results have been implemented and validated in a number of case studies.