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Towards a Systematic Method for Developing Meta Attack Language Instances

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2022, EMMSAD 2022)

Abstract

Successfully developing domain-specific languages (DSLs) demands language engineers to consider their organizational context, which is challenging. Action design research (ADR) provides a conceptual framework to address this challenge. Since ADR’s application to the engineering of DSLs has not yet been examined, we investigate applying it to the development of threat modeling DSLs based on the Meta Attack Language (MAL), a metamodeling language for the specification of domain-specific threat modeling languages. To this end, we conducted a survey with experienced MAL developers on their development activities. We extract guidelines and align these, together with established DSL design guidelines, to the conceptual model of ADR. The research presented, aims to be the first step to investigate whether ADR can be used to systematically engineer DSLs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    MAL Survey https://forms.gle/Wuv5sJgqZSctgP4LA (Accessed 2021-06-01).

  2. 2.

    https://collaborate.mitre.org/attackics/index.php/Main_Page.

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Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program under the Grant Agreement No. 832907, the Swedish Centre for Smart Grids and Energy Storage (SweGRIDS), and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under Grant Agreement No. 441207927.

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Hacks, S., Katsikeas, S., Rencelj Ling, E., Xiong, W., Pfeiffer, J., Wortmann, A. (2022). Towards a Systematic Method for Developing Meta Attack Language Instances. In: Augusto, A., Gill, A., Bork, D., Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Schmidt, R. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2022 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 450. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07475-2_10

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