Assessing the Impact of Refactoring on Security-Critical Object-Oriented Designs

Refactoring focuses on improving the reusability, maintainability and performance of programs. However, the impact of refactoring on the security of a given program has received little attention. In this work, we focus on the design of object-oriented applications and use metrics to assess the impact of a number of standard refactoring rules on their security by evaluating the metrics before and after refactoring. This assessment tells us which refactoring steps can increase the security level of a given program from the point of view of potential information flow, allowing application designers to improve their system's security. at an early stage.

I. Introduction

Although there have been many studies into secure coding techniques [1] [2], a more efficient strategy is to assess program security at design time. We have previously proposed a set of metrics which allow designers to compare the security of various alternative designs for a given object-oriented program [3] [4], by quantifying potential information flow from ‘classified’ data values.