Secure Software Architectural Patterns Designed with Secure Connectors

This paper addresses secure software architectural patterns designed with secure connectors, where security concerns are encapsulated in secure connectors, separately from application concerns. Because secure software architectural patterns address security and application concerns, the design of the patterns needs to blend those concerns; thus, they can be complicated. Secure connectors can reduce the complexity of the design of secure software architectural patterns by separating security and application concerns. In this paper, secure connectors are designed for secure software architectural patterns by considering the security patterns required by application components and the communication patterns between the components. Secure connectors make the design of secure software architectural patterns more maintainable and evolvable. We have implemented a secure distributed baseball game application using the secure MVC software architectural pattern to validate our research.