An Analysis of the Security Patterns Landscape

Architectural and design patterns represent effective techniques to package expert knowledge in a reusable way. Over time, they have proven to be very successful in software engineering. Moreover, in the security discipline, a well-known principle calls for the use of standard, timetested solutions rather than inventing ad-hoc solutions from scratch. Clearly, security patterns provide a way to adhere to this principle. However, their adoption does not live up to their potential. To understand the reasons, this paper analyzes an extensive set of published security patterns according to several dimensions and outlines the directions for improvement. 1