SERENITY DAY IN BRUSSELS - June 17th, 2009
Thon City Centre Hotel, Brussels 1210
Current practices for developing secure systems are still closer to art than to an engineering discipline. Security is still treated as an add-on and is therefore not integrated into software development practices and tools. Experienced security artisans are still the key to achieving acceptable levels of security.

Several approaches and research strands have tried to address this situation in order to introduce rigour and engineering approaches in the treatment of security aspects in information systems, mainly focusing on the development phases. Traditionally, the term security engineering has been used to denote partial approaches that cover only small parts of the processes that are required in order to create a secure system, like modelling, verification, programming, etc. Even in the cases that the approach is closer to a methodology, and has achieved a certain level of maturity, the key concepts and workflows are highly influenced by the way had been treated by the security artisans. Therefore, one finds in the literature that the main books about security engineering describe threat-based engineering approaches.

Today, the current trend towards distributed and open systems has revealed the important limitations of current threat-based security engineering approaches. In particular, threat-based security engineering creates systems that are very context-dependent, and therefore, fail to address the needs of the future open and distributed systems paradigms. The main problems that the new computing paradigms introduce are the high levels of heterogeneity, dynamism and autonomy, as well as the large scale. The result is that engineers have to deal with runtime situations that are unpredictable at design time. The SERENITY Day will introduce the SERENITY model of secure and dependable systems and will show how it supports the creation of secure and dependable systems for these new computing paradigms. Additionally we will present the SERENITY integrated engineering processes as the backbone of a new security engineering discipline.

The main drawbacks of current approaches is that they fail to provide a reasonable support for systematic engineering since the identification, characterization and specification of the protection goals and the related threats as well as the selection of appropriate mechanisms and countermeasures depends on the experience of the engineers. Consequently, these approaches represent only minor improvements over the security craftsmanship era. However, they have been used for some time with uneven results. The SERENITY Day is planned as a forum to discuss this aspect and will advocate a change of paradigm based on the definition of integrated processes with well-defined goals and interfaces that combine the different techniques, methodologies and tools to support the engineering of secure systems.

We expect to produce as outcomes of this event the following specific results:

• 
Dissemination of the SERENITY Model and Processes among high-level representatives from academia, industry and government institutions.
• 
Creation of a "Security Engineering Manifesto" advocating the establishment of Security as an Engineering discipline; and
• 

Kickstarting the production of a new "Security Engineering BOK (Body of Knowledge)" that provides a map of techniques, methodologies and tools along with their relation and their role in the new security engineering processes.


Serenity Day Programme and agenda

SESSION

SCHEDULE

TITLE

DURATION

S0a.

9:00-9:15

Welcome and Introduction: Jacques Bus, Head of Trust and Security Unit DG INFSO: MEDIA European Commission

15 min

S0b.

9:15-9:30

Presentation, objectives and procedures

15 min

S1.

9:30-10:30

Presentations of Serenity

1 hour

B1.

10:30-11:00

Coffee Break 
Demos**: Communication, Air Traffic Management, e-Health...

30 min

S2a.

11:00-12:30

State of disciplines I:
Speakers:
• 
Security properties and Security Requirements Fabio
Martinelli,
CNR, Italy
• 
Formal models and Static Verification, Jorge Cuellar,
Siemens
• 
Secure Processes and security-aware SW engineering:
Eduardo Fernandez Medina
, UCLM (Castilla la Mancha)
• 
HW-SW Security: Jean Jacques Quisquater, UCLouvain
• 
Crypto: Bart Preneel, KU Leuven
• 
Agent oriented SW Engineering for Security Modelling:
Haris Mouratidis, U of East London
• 
Language based security: to be confirmed

1 hour and
30 min

B2.

12:30-13:30

Lunch Break and Demos**

1 hour

S2b.

13:30-14:30

State of disciplines II:
Speakers:
• 
Industry View: compliance Volkmar Lotz, SAP Research
• 
Industry view: integration Matthias Schunder, IBM Zurich
• 
Security Patterns: Markus Schumacher, Virtual Forge (Germany)
Authors' slide presentations (excused as speakers):
• 
Security Modelling: Jan Jurjens, Open University UK
• 
Industry view: integration, Aljosa Pasic, Atos Research
Spain

• 
ID management and security: Antonio F. Skarmeta,
University of Murcia

• 
Security-aware software engineering, Ernesto Damiani,
University of Milan, Italy

• 
Software protection, Yoram Ofek, University of Trento,
Italy

1 hour

S3.

14:30-15:15

Joint Discussion

45 min

S4.

15:15-16:15

Elaboration of the "Security Engineering Manifesto" and "Sec. Eng. BOK (Body of Knowledge)" phase 1

1 hour

B3.

16:15-16:45

Coffee Break and Demos**

30 min

16:45-17:45

Elaboration of the "Security Engineering Manifesto" and "Sec. Eng. BOK (Body of Knowledge)" phase 2

1 hour

S5

After 17:45

Rump session, follow up initiatives and networking, Demos...

free


** Demos:
Communication Prototype Demo: Telefonica
Air Traffic Management, ATM Coordination Tool (ATC) Demo: Deep Blue and Engineering Informatica (Italy)
Smart Home Poster/Demo: U of Trento



© 2009 Serenity Forum