2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Contextual System Development
Characteristics
We provide relevant context with respect to systems
development in IAI, which affected the design of our
methodology.
In IAI – as in many other high-tech industries and
companies that develop complex, engineered systems
– systems development is typically done within the
scope of a development project. The development
scheme favours a top-down approach, according to
which system-level requirements and design are
established to meet stakeholder requirements (and
specifically, the purchaser of the system). These then
drive the development of lower-level components.
Another related characteristic of systems
development in IAI is its hierarchical approach,
which views the system as a hierarchical organization
of components. This is aligned with the view offered
by Vee-model, a prominent system development
model (Forsberg and Mooz, 1991). For example, the
highest hierarchy of a system comprises several sub-
systems; each of these sub-systems includes several
lower-level components that may be further
decomposed into even lower-level components, and
so forth. The hierarchical organization provides
engineering and managerial context and
responsibilities (e.g., reflecting in a Work-
Breakdown Structure associated with the
development project).
A significant manifestation of the hierarchical
approach is that – throughout systems development –
the systems-engineering team responsible for the
development of a component in a specific hierarchy
defines requirements for the lower hierarchy’s
components, according to which the lower-level
components are designed and eventually verified.
These requirements are expected to relate to multiple
aspects of functionality, performance and quality,
with cybersecurity aspects included.
In general, the cost of performing changes late in
the system development life-cycle or after a system is
fielded is increasingly high (compared to performing
these changes earlier or avoiding them by proper
design in advance), and changes that originate from a
cybersecurity perspective are no exception. It is,
therefore, important to communicate the need for
cybersecurity mechanisms as early as possible in the
development effort (Mead and Stehney, 2005;
Shevchenko et al., 2018).
Also, it is noteworthy that IAI development
projects typically last for several years, and that the
resulting systems remain operational for a long period
of time (a 10-20 year operational period is not
uncommon). During such extended periods of
development and operations, the organization (and
often, its customers) considers it important to have an
up-to-date documentation of the system’s design.
Also, throughout such lengthy life-cycles, the
cybersecurity threat landscape is subject to change
(due to newly emerging attack technologies and
techniques, for example), and this introduces further
challenges to the threat and risk assessment of the
systems.
2.2 Threat and Risk Assessment
Typically, the threat and risk assessment of systems
is expressed as natural language text, tables and free-
form diagrams (that typically provide a specific view
of a given design). A threat model related publication
(Bodeau and McCollum, 2018), for example, depicts
a representative example as a story with free-form
diagrams. Another representative example is a radar
system security research report (Cohen et al., 2019),
in which threats are expressed in the form of a table.
The aforementioned documentation is typically
prepared ad-hoc and is not necessarily aligned with
the actual system design. This does not support
rigorous engineering nor the establishing of the
cybersecurity posture throughout the system life-
cycle. The free-form approach to TRA indicates a gap
in sound, practical methodology.
Some conceptual frameworks relating to TRA and
to security by-design exist, providing important
concepts and guidance. Two prominent examples
follow. First, MITRE – a not-for-profit organization
which specializes in systems engineering and
cybersecurity – offers a threat modelling framework
(Bodeau and McCollum, 2018), which identifies the
system composition and data flows as critical in
evaluating the potential impact of a cyber-attack.
Second, the United States National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) offers an
authoritative source – NIST SP 800-160 – which
discusses systems security-by-design, and provides
exhaustive natural language guidelines for
introducing security considerations in systems
engineering activities (Ross et al., 2016). Both
aforementioned publications lack a concrete
approach for applying TRA for systems design. They
do, however, stress the importance of introducing
requirements for the system and its constituents
(alternately, introducing capabilities/functions to the
system and its constituents) from a security
perspective. Introducing quality related system