Using AADL to Assess Architectural Concerns for Cyber Security

We describe how we apply the SAE AS 5506 Architecture and Analysis Design Language (AADL) [4] to reason about contextual and architectural concerns for cyber security. A system’s cyber security certification requires verification that the system’s cyber security mechanisms are correct, non-bypassable, and tamper-resistant. We can verify correctness by examining the mechanism itself, but verifying the other qualities requires us to examine the context in which that mechanism resides. Understanding that context and validating the system’s evolving design against that context is an objective for the Architecture Centric Virtual Integration Process (ACVIP), an AADL-based approach to model and detect system design defects before they become too costly to fix. We describe our work to apply AADL to assess non-bypassability and tamper-resistance. The results of our research - tool plugins for cyber security architectural validation - support system developers today in their ACVIP activities.