Towards a Requirements-Driven Workbench for Supporting Software Certification and Accreditation

Security certification activities for software systems rely heavily on requirements mandated by regulatory documents and their compliance evidences to support accreditation decisions. Therefore, the design of a workbench to support these activities should be grounded in a thorough understanding of the characteristics of certification requirements and their relationships with certification activities. To this end, we utilize our findings from the case study of a certification process of The United States Department of Defense (DoD) to identify the design objectives of a requirements-driven workbench for supporting certification analysts. The primary contributions of this paper are: identifying key areas of automation and tool support for requirements-driven certification activities; an ontology-driven dynamic and flexible workbench architecture to address process variability; and a prototype implementation.