Towards adaptation and evolution of domain-specific knowledge for maintaining secure systems

Creating and maintaining secure software require a good understanding of the system and its environment. Knowledge management is therefore one of the key factors to maintain secure software successfully. However, acquiring and modeling knowledge is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Thus, knowledge ought to be shared among different projects and must be adapted to their specific needs. In this paper, we present an approach allowing the stepwise adaptation from domain-to project-specific knowledge based on OWL ontologies. For this purpose, we define a basic set of adaptation operators which allows effective and frugal changes. Moreover, we discuss how our approach can be integrated into common software process models in order to adapt knowledge required for maintenance. Since domain-and project-specific knowledge changes over time, we show how our approach copes with changes efficiently, so that the affected knowledge remains consistent. The shared use of knowledge significantly reduces the complexity and effort to model required knowledge in various projects. Our case study and tool implementation shows the benefits for maintaining secure systems.