Design of Secure Software Architectures with Secure Connectors

Abstract

This paper describes the design of secure connectors that are used in the design of secure software architectures for distributed business applications. Mixing security concerns with business concerns in software architectures makes applications more complex. With the goal of making secure software architectures more maintainable and evolvable, the secure connectors proposed in this paper are designed separately from business application components by considering different communication patterns between the components as well as security services required by application components. Each secure connector encapsulates security relevant objects to provide application components with security services. In this paper, secure connectors are applied to design the software architectures of electronic commerce and automated teller machine applications.