We present a new approach to building secure systems. In our approach, which we call Model Driven Security, designers specify system models along with their security requirements and use tools to automatically generate system architectures from the models, including complete, configured access control infrastructures. Rather than fixing one particular modeling language for this process, we propose a general schema for constructing such languages that combines languages for modeling systems with languages for modeling security. We present several instances of this schema that combine (both syntactically and semantically) different UML modeling languages with a security modeling language for formalizing access control requirements. From models in the combined languages, we automatically generate access control infrastructures for server-based applications, built from declarative and programmatic access control mechanisms. The modeling languages and generation process are semantically well-founded and are based on an extension of Role-Based Access Control. We have implemented this approach in a UML-based CASE-tool and report on experiments.

Model Driven Architecture is an approach to increasing the quality of complex software systems based on creating high-level system models and automatically generating system architectures from the models. We show how this paradigm can be specialized to what we call Model Driven Security. In our specialization, a designer builds a system model along with security requirements, and automatically generates from this a complete, configured security infrastructure.We propose a modular approach to constructing modeling languages supporting this process, which combines languages for modeling system design with languages for modeling security. We present an application to constructing systems from process models, where we combine a UML-based process design language with a security modeling language for formalizing access control requirements. From models in the combined language, we automatically generate security architectures for distributed applications.

We present a modeling language for the model-driven development of secure, distributed systems based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our approach is based on role-based access control with additional support for specifying authorization constraints. We show how UML can be used to specify information related to access control in the overall design of an application and how this information can be used to automatically generate complete access control infrastructures. Our approach can be used to improve productivity during the development of secure distributed systems and the quality of the resulting systems.