ArgueSecure: Out-of-the-Box Security Risk Assessment

Most established security risk assessment methodologies aim to produce ranked lists of risks. But ranking requires quantification of risks, which in turn relies on data which may not be available or estimations which might not be accurate. As an alternative, we have previously proposed argumentation-based risk assessment. In this paper, based on practitioner feedback, we introduce the latest iteration of this method accompanied by two dedicated tools: an online, collaborative web-portal and an offline version. We focus on the lessons learned in iteratively developing and evaluating these tools and the underlying framework. This new framework – called ArgueSecure – focuses on graphically modelling the risk landscape as a collapsible tree. This tree structure intuitively encodes argument traces, therefore maintaining traceability of the results and providing insight into the decision process.