Evolution of Security in Automated Migration Processes

As users’ requirements change in today’s fast-paced business market, computer software has to adapt to new hardware, technologies and requirements to keep up with the trend. Therefore, to avoid depreciation and obsolescence, which can have detrimental effects on a product, software needs to be constantly maintained and, when passed a certain point in its lifecycle, needs to be migrated or re-developed from scratch. Automated migration enables software vendors to decrease the cost of the migration process by source code generation. However, as security is a crucial requirement in any system, it is not guaranteed that the previously satisfied security requirements are satisfied in the migrated software. Therefore, it is critical to study the evolution of security throughout the automated migration process to predict where new security vulnerabilities may emerge and to understand the scale on which the security is affected. Thesis Master of Applied Science (MASc)