A Knowledge-based Expert System for Supporting Security in Software Engineering Projects

secure software systems requires the intersection between two engineering disciplines, software engineering and security engineering. There is a lack of a defined security mechanism for each of the software development phases, which affects the quality of the software system intensively. In this paper, the authors are proposing a framework to consider the security aspects in all the phases of the software development process from the requirements until the deployment of the software product, with three additional phases that are important to automatically produce a secure system. The framework is developed after analyzing the existing models for secure system development. The key elements of the framework are the addition of the phases like physical, training, and auditing, where they improve the level of security in software engineering projects. The authors found so a solution for the replacement of the knowledge of the security engineer through the construction of an intelligent knowledge-based system, which provides the software developer with the security rules needed in each phase of the software development lifecycle and it improves the awareness of the software developer about the security related issues in each phase of the software development lifecycle. The framework and the expert system are tested on a variety of software projects, where a significant improvement of security in each phase of the software development process is achieved.