A Security Officers’ Workbench

The primary role of the security officer is to advise senior management on the optimal deployment of security resources. This is a task of considerable complexity and it is suggested that the security officer would be assisted by computer tools that provide an effective security model of the system under consideration, so that the system risks may be identified and prioritized. The development of such a model, based upon a risk data repository, is described. It is also suggested that a countermeasure architecture may be used to relate external threats to the logical nodes of system platforms, and thence to physical and procedural realities of the organization. The effort of software development, data collection, encoding and entry for such a model could well prove to be excessive in terms of the expected benefits. It is therefore proposed, in this paper, that hypertext be employed to allow pre-existing data to be readily entered in its native form, and then manipulated by the security officer. This model has been used in a banking environment and the hypertext version has been employed in the study of a computerized university student admission system.