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Security patterns can be a valuable vehicle to design secure software. Several proposals have been advanced to improve the usability of security patterns. They often describe extra annotations to be included in the pattern documentation. This paper presents an empirical study that validates whether those proposals provide any real benefit for software architects. A controlled experiment has been executed with 90 master students, who have performed several design tasks involving the hardening of a software architecture via security patterns. The results show that annotations produce benefits in terms of a reduced number of alternatives that need to be considered during the selection of a suitable pattern. However, they do not reduce the time spent in the selection process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating secure and privacy-protecting systems entails the simultaneous coordination of development activities along three different yet mutually influencing dimensions: translating (security and privacy) goals to design choices, analyzing the design for threats, and performing a risk analysis of these threats in light of the goals. These activities are often executed in isolation, and such a disconnect impedes the prioritization of elicited threats, assessment which threats are sufficiently mitigated, and decision-making in terms of which risks can be accepted. In the proposed TMaRA approach, we facilitate the simultaneous consideration of these dimensions by integrating support for threat modeling, risk analysis, and design decisions. Key risk assessment inputs are systematically modeled and threat modeling efforts are fed back into the risk management process. This enables prioritizing threats based on their estimated risk, thereby providing decision support in the mitigation, acceptance, or transferral of risk for the system under design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]