Empirical assessment of security requirements and architecture: Lessons learned

Over the past three years, our groups at the University ofLeuven and the University of Trento have been conducting a number ofexperimental studies. In particular, two common themes can be easilyidentified within our work. First, we have investigated the value of sev-eral threat modeling and risk assessment techniques. The second themerelates to the problem of preserving security over time, i.e., securityevolution. Although the empirical results obtained in our studies areinteresting on their own, the main goal of this chapter is to share our ex-perience. The objective is to provide useful, hands-on insight on this typeof research work so that the work of other researchers in the communitywould be facilitated. The contribution of this chapter is the discussionof the challenges we faced during our experimental work. Contextually,we also outline those solutions that worked out in our studies and couldbe reused in the field by other studie