Scientific research work

ABERDI Inc. - Research work in progress

ABERDI Inc. - Publications available

Towards Advanced Security Engineering for Enterprise Information Systems: Solving Security, Resilience and Usability Issues Together Within Improvement of User Experience

By Wilson Goudalo, Christophe Kolski and Frédéric Vanderhaegen

In our era of the service industry, information systems play a major place, even a vital position for businesses, organizations and individuals. Information systems are facing new ongoing security threats, more sophisticated and of different natures. In this context, it is important to prevent attackers from achieving their outcomes, manage the inevitable breaches, and minimize their impacts. Security practices must be conducted in an engineering framework; engineering of security has to be improved. For this, it is proposed to develop innovative and broad systemic approaches that operate together on several axes, by improving user experience. We track and solve Resilience, Security and Usability issues jointly in enterprise information systems.

Keywords: Enterprise information system; System resilience; Information security; Privacy; Human-Computer Interaction; Usability; User experience; Socio-technical systems; Design patterns

Towards advanced engineering of enterprise IS security. A joint approach to security, usability and resilience in socio-technical systems.

By Wilson Goudalo, Christophe Kolski and Frédéric Vanderhaegen

In the era of the service industry, information systems play a major role. Sometimes they even hold a vital position for businesses, organizations and individuals. Information systems are constantly confronted with new security threats; these are more and more sophisticated and of different natures. In this context, it is important to prevent attackers from achieving their results, to deal with the inevitable flaws and to minimize their impacts. Safety practices should be conducted within an engineering framework; safety engineering needs to be improved. For this, it is proposed to develop systemic, innovative approaches on broad spectra and which work on several axes in a joint way, by improving the user experience. Our objective is to track down and solve in a concomitant and harmonious way the problems of security, usability and resilience in enterprise information systems. In this article, we position socio-technical systems with regard to the information systems of companies and organizations. We deal with the paradigms of socio-technical systems and we pay particular attention to the correlations between security, usability and resilience. A case study illustrates the proposed approach.

KEYWORDS: security, usability, resilience, semantics, metrics, conceptual model, joint analysis, BPMN, UML, design models, user experience, respect for privacy, corporate IS, socio-technical systems.

Toward Engineering of Security of Information Systems: The Security Acts

By Wilson Goudalo

Business professionals and researchers have made considerable efforts and significant technical breakthroughs in information security in the last decades. Nevertheless, companies and organizations continue to incur losses associated with security issues. In order to remedy to this situation, we propose a new approach to information security engineering for companies and organizations. First, this approach is based on the standards and good practices of security, second, is inspired from the best practices and feedback of advances in the engineering of enterprise information systems security, and third, its design takes advantage of more than twelve years of experience in system architecture and information security for reknown banks and financial institutions. Our approach to engineering of information systems security aims at: - reducing losses relating to security issues in companies and organizations, operating on an enhanced and sustained information security; - improving the reliability of processes in companies and organizations, and assisting companies in legal and regulatory compliance efforts, operating on security indicators and checkpoints at various levels of management; - helping companies gain competitive advantages through their security management solutions, operating on a global security monitoring system with feedback. As further development of the basic principle of Security know-how Encapsulation into UML profiles [14], we have introduced the mapping global picture of the Process of Security engineering into the formalism of Business Processes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a clear methodology based on the elaboration of the key Security Acts of the process of information systems security engineering.

Keywords: security acts; security engineering; BPM; enterprise information system security.