A Systematic Review of Model-Driven Security

To face continuously growing security threats and requirements, sound methodologies for constructing secure systems are required. In this context, Model-Driven Security (MDS) has emerged since more than a decade ago as a specialized Model-Driven Engineering approach for supporting the development of secure systems. MDS aims at improving the productivity of the development process and quality of the resulting secure systems, with models as the main artifact. This paper presents how we systematically examined existing published work in MDS and its results. The systematic review process, which is based on a formally designed review protocol, allowed us to identify, classify, and evaluate different MDS approaches. To be more specific, from thousands of relevant papers found, a final set of the most relevant MDS publications has been identified, strictly selected, and reviewed. We present a taxonomy for MDS, which is used to synthesize data in order to classify and evaluate the selected MDS approaches. The results draw a wide picture of existing MDS research showing the current status of the key aspects in MDS as well as the identified most relevant MDS approaches. We discuss the main limitations of the existing MDS approaches and suggest some potential research directions based on these insights.