A Template for Writing Security Requirements

Quality security requirements contribute to the success of secure software development. However, the process of eliciting and writing security requirements is tedious and complex, It requires Requirements Engineers (RE) to have security experience in the process of eliciting consistent security requirements from the clients-stakeholders. Considering the requirements are derived from natural language, RE faced problems in eliciting and writing security requirements as they have the tendency to misunderstand the real needs and the security terms used. Motivated from these problems, this paper proposed a security requirements library and template to assist RE in writing security requirements. The library was built based on compilation of security attributes derived from syntax analysis and keywords matching. The realization of the library and writing template was demonstrated using two sets of scenario taken from real projects. The usage examples show that the template is able to help the RE to write security requirements by providing the relevant and suitable sentence structure as guidance.