A Compliance-Driven Framework for Privacy and Security in Highly Regulated Socio-Technical Environments: An E-Government Case Study

Regulatory compliance is a top priority for organizations in highly regulated ecosystems. As most operations are automated, the compliance efforts focus on the information systems supporting the business processes of the organizations and, to a lesser extent, on the humans using, managing, and maintaining them. Yet, the human factor is an unpredictable and challenging component of a secure system development and should be considered throughout the development process as both a legitimate user and a threat. In this chapter, the authors propose COMPARCH as a compliance-driven system engineering framework for privacy and security in socio-technical systems. It consists of (1) a risk-based requirement management process, (2) a test-driven security and privacy modeling framework, and (3) a simulation-based validation approach. The satisfaction of the regulatory requirements is evaluated through the simulation traces analysis. The authors use as a running example an E-CITY system providing municipality services to local communities.