Is Modeling Access Control Worth It?

Implementing access control policies is an error-prone task that can have severe consequences for the security of software applications. Model-driven approaches have been proposed in the literature and associated tools have been developed with the goal of reducing the complexity of this task and helping developers to produce secure software efficiently. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical data supporting the advantages of model-driven security approaches over code-centric approaches, which are the de-facto industry standard for software development. In this work, we compare the result of implementing the same functional and security requirements by multiple developer groups in the context of a security engineering graduate course. We thereby obtain evidence on the security and efficiency of a tool-based modeldriven approach to security from the literature compared to a direct implementation in a well-known, modern web-development framework. For example, the projects using model-driven development pass up to 50% more security tests on average with less development effort. Also, we observe that models are twice as concise as manual implementations, which improves system maintainability. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → System modeling languages; • Security and privacy → Software security engineering; Access control.