skip to main content
10.1145/1134744.1134756acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagespldiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Empirical relation between coupling and attackability in software systems:: a case study on DOS

Published: 10 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Over the last decades, software quality attributes such as maintainability, reliability, and understandability have been widely studied. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the field of software security. Attackability is a concept proposed recently in the research literature t to measure the extent that a software system or service could be the target of successful attacks. Like most external attributes, attackability is to some extent disconnected from the internal of software products. To improve the quality of software products we need to be able to affect its internal features. So, for attackability measures to be useful for software products enhancement, we need to identify related internal software attributes. We study in this paper the empirical relationship between attackability as an external software quality attribute with coupling as an internal software attribute. Specifically, we use a case study based on denial of service (DOS) attacks conducted against a on line medical record keeping system. Through regression analysis, we establish that there is a strong correlation between attackability and coupling.

References

[1]
S. Brocklehurst, B. Littlewood, T. Olovsson, E. Johsson, On Measurement of Operational Security, Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference on Computer Assurance, 1994.
[2]
A. Chou, J. Yang, B. Chelf, S. Hallen, D. Engler, An empirical study of operating systems errors, ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Oct. 2001, pp. 73--88.
[3]
E. N. Fenton, M. Meil, A Critique of Software Defect Prediction Models, IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering, VOL, 25, No. 3, May/June, 1999.
[4]
J. Gray, A census of tandem system availability between 1985 and 1990, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 39, no. 4, Oct. 1990.
[5]
M. Howard, J. Pincus, J. M. Wing, Measuring Relative Attack Surfaces, Proceeding of Workshop on Advanced Developments in Software and System Security, 2003.
[6]
B. Littlewood, S. Brocklehurst, E. N. Fenton, P. Mellor, S. Page, D. Wright, Towards Operational Measures of Computer Security, Journal of Computer Security 2,2/3 (1993) p. 211--229.
[7]
I. Lee, R. Iyer, Faults, Symptoms, And Software Fault Tolerance In The Tandem GUARDIAN Operating System, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, 1993.
[8]
M. Y. Liu, I. Troare, UML-based Security Measures of Software Products. International Workshop on Methodologies for Pervasive and Embedded Software (MOMPES'04), 4th International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design (ACSD-04), Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, June 2004.
[9]
R. Ortalo, Y. Deswarte, M. Kaaniche, Experimenting with Quantitative Evaluation Tools for Monitoring Operational Security. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 25,5 (1999) p.633--650.
[10]
M. Sullivan, R. Chillarge, Software Defects And Their Impact On System 118 Availability, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, June 1991.
[11]
J. Voas, A. Ghosh, G. McGraw, F. Charron, K. Miller, Defining an Adaptive Software Security Metric from a Dynamic Software Failure Tolerance Measure, Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference on Computer Assurance, 1996.
[12]
M. Andrews, J. A. Whittaker, How to Break Web Software, Addison-Wekley, 2005.
[13]
http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/tools/jprobe/
[14]
http://tomcat.apache.org/
[15]
http://www.eviews.com/eviews4/

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Function-Level Software Metrics for Predicting Vulnerable Code2024 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI)10.1109/IRI62200.2024.00059(252-257)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
  • (2022)Machine learning techniques for software vulnerability prediction: a comparative studyApplied Intelligence10.1007/s10489-022-03350-552:15(17614-17635)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022
  • (2018)An Approach for Trustworthiness Benchmarking Using Software Metrics2018 IEEE 23rd Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC)10.1109/PRDC.2018.00019(84-93)Online publication date: Dec-2018
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Empirical relation between coupling and attackability in software systems:: a case study on DOS

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    PLAS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 workshop on Programming languages and analysis for security
    June 2006
    102 pages
    ISBN:1595933743
    DOI:10.1145/1134744
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 10 June 2006

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. attackability
    2. denial of service
    3. security engineering
    4. software metrics
    5. software quality

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    PLAS06
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 43 of 77 submissions, 56%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Function-Level Software Metrics for Predicting Vulnerable Code2024 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI)10.1109/IRI62200.2024.00059(252-257)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
    • (2022)Machine learning techniques for software vulnerability prediction: a comparative studyApplied Intelligence10.1007/s10489-022-03350-552:15(17614-17635)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022
    • (2018)An Approach for Trustworthiness Benchmarking Using Software Metrics2018 IEEE 23rd Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC)10.1109/PRDC.2018.00019(84-93)Online publication date: Dec-2018
    • (2018)Empirical Analysis of Static Code Metrics for Predicting Risk Scores in Android Applications5th International Symposium on Data Mining Applications10.1007/978-3-319-78753-4_8(84-94)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2018
    • (2017)Software Metrics as Indicators of Security Vulnerabilities2017 IEEE 28th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE.2017.11(216-227)Online publication date: Oct-2017
    • (2011)A Hierarchical Security Assessment Model for Object-Oriented ProgramsProceedings of the 2011 11th International Conference on Quality Software10.1109/QSIC.2011.31(218-227)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2011
    • (2011)A framework for vulnerability minimization — Object oriented design perspective2011 2nd International Conference on Computer and Communication Technology (ICCCT-2011)10.1109/ICCCT.2011.6075131(499-504)Online publication date: Sep-2011
    • (2011)Using complexity, coupling, and cohesion metrics as early indicators of vulnerabilitiesJournal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal10.1016/j.sysarc.2010.06.00357:3(294-313)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2011
    • (2010)Using allopoietic agents in replicated software to respond to errors, faults, and attacksProceedings of the 48th annual ACM Southeast Conference10.1145/1900008.1900091(1-4)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2010
    • (2010)Can complexity, coupling, and cohesion metrics be used as early indicators of vulnerabilities?Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/1774088.1774504(1963-1969)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2010
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media