Towards a Comprehensive View of Secure Software Engineering

Secure software engineering is a big challenge. This is mainly due to the increasing complexity, openness and extensibility of modern applications, which make a complete analysis of security requirements very hard. The overall problem space is consequently no longer easily comprehensible for developers. This paper is an attempt to explore some of these issues underlying secure software engineering. We propose a secure software engineering framework, which suggests considering secure software engineering along four different, but complementary, views. Each view is capturing a particular relevant aspect of secure software engineering. Our motivations for developing this framework are to: (a) help understand and clarify the secure software engineering domain, (b) guide in classifying and comparing both secure software and securing approaches and (c) help researchers to identify new research axes.