Security patterns: Research direction, metamodel, application and verification

Security patterns (SPs) are reusable encapsulated solutions to corresponding recurrent security problems under specific contexts to achieve security goals in systems and software development. Over the past ten years, the author together with researchers and practitioners have led many research projects on SPs in order to realize and support secure software systems development. This paper introduces achievements of these projects including a survey on SP researches, a metamodel for cloud security and privacy knowledge including SPs, a model-driven SP application technique, and a tool for verifying SP application in models and code. As a future work, it is planned to enhance the survey as well as each technique and tool. Moreover, it is planned to integrate all techniques and tools into a unified model-driven development environment with a pattern-based and knowledge-based secure development process and a case-based management system based on our metamodel.