Towards an abstraction layer for security assurance measurements:Invited paper

Measurement of any complex, operational system is challenging due to the continuous independent evolution of the components. Security risks introduce another dimension of dynamicity, reflected to risk management and security assurance activities. The availability of different measurements and their properties will vary during the overall system lifecycle. To be useful, a measurement framework in this context needs to be able to adapt to both the changes in the target of measurement and in the available measurement infrastructure. In this study, we introduce a taxonomy-based approach for relating the available and attainable measurements to the measurement requirements of security assurance plans by providing an Abstraction Layer that makes it easier to manage these dynamic features. The introduced approach is investigated in terms of a security assurance case example of firewall functionality in a Push E-mail service system