Towards a Common Security and Privacy Requirements Elicitation Methodology

There are many methodologies that have been proposed in the literature for identifying the security and privacy requirements that must be satisfied by an information system in order to protect its users. At the same time, there are several "privacy principles" that have been considered as equally important for the avoidance of privacy violation incidents. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no methodology that can cover both the identification of the security and privacy requirements and at the same time to take into account the main privacy principles. The consequence is that the designers of an information system usually follow an ad hoc approach for the identification of security/privacy requirements, thus failing to protect users in an effective way. This paper introduces the main idea behind a methodology that integrates the basic steps of well-established risk analysis methodologies with those of methodologies used for the identification of privacy requirements, considering, at the same time, the most well-known privacy principles. The proposed methodology aims to assist information system designers to come up with a complete and accurate list of all security and privacy requirements that must be satisfied by the system.