Software Architecture and Security

This is a about a very close relationship. A stable, consistent, well-defined and documented architecture is a crucial precondition to achieve a certain level of security. This is especially true in a world of web-technologies, peer-to-peer communication, ubiquitous computing - just to name a couple of trends and paradigms. But there does still a misconception exist on how to achieve this state of security. Typical approaches are the following measures listed without meaning and priority: network separation, appliances like firewalls and mal-ware detection, access control, monitoring, logging, encryption, and secure coding efforts to avoid buffer overflows and other nasty errors. I do totally agree on this list. It’s all a must in the world of TCP/IP based protocols, today’s operating systems and other of-the-shelf software products. But this is not enough. It is not possible to defend a software system where basic functionalities are not strictly separated in main components and without well defined interfaces. These components should be deployable on different nodes easily without greater adjustments. The identity of all actors (people and software!) in the system in order to achieve correct authentication and authorization must be guaranteed, especially in distributed scenarios. This enumeration is not complete but it illustrates the need of a basic foundation called architecture. Not easy to accomplish for complex systems but there is no other solution available. A simple example can help to illuminate this need. Threat Analysis and Threat Modeling are a probate approaches to find weaknesses in a system. Unfortunately, this is not feasible without having a documented architecture available. Any offer to do the documentation of the architecture afterwards is an unmistakable sign that there is something wrong. Security requirements must be addressed very early in the development process in order to be considered in architecture and design. If this is done, achieving the required level of security might be possible. To get back to the relationship thing, architecture and security have the same enemy: complexity (We all know this from Bruce Schneier). But well-structured architecture can help to tame this beast, by avoiding indirections, tons of wrappers and all the other things that make software inscrutable; well structured-architecture which adheres to one of the most important goals in software architecture: SIMPLICITY.