Deliverable D2.2 “System Requirements and Software Architecture”

The overall aim of the ENCASE project is to leverage the latest advances in usable security and privacy of minors (age 10-18) in order to design and implement a user-centric architecture for the protection of minors from malicious actors in Online Social Networks (OSNs). This deliverable, “System Requirements and Software Architecture”, is a revision of D2.1, which was an initial specification of the system’s requirements and the software architecture.

In order to identity the magnitude of the problem, we have also surveyed the existing security and privacy enhancing web-based tools and performed a research state-of-art on cyber security risks and on security in OSNs. Moreover, we further investigated the problem by collecting data from various OSNs and through our own measurements we intended to verify the results of the literature review provided in D2.1.

According to the use cases requirements engineering methodology that ENCASE has opted for, the user stories are the next step. This deliverable provides more sophisticated use cases and the usage scenarios has been transformed into user stories - first person narrative stories - that essentially provide another level of detail, addressing each user role individually and from a first person perspective. The benefit using this approach is that enables you to produce accurate technical requirements without taking into account the limitations imposed by the technology at hand.

Based on the aforementioned we were in position to design the reference architecture of the ENCASE ecosystem and to define and describe the various components that consist this architecture and the interactions between them. This architecture comprises three browser add-ons, a web- proxy service that in collaboration with a middleware service will be responsible to detect malicious behaviour, fake identities and activity, and sensitive content in OSNs based on sophisticated machine learning detection rules generated by a data analytics software stack, which is the back-end of our architecture.

Lastly, this document relies on the above efforts and mainly in the user stories in order to produce a list of specific technical requirements. The requirements are classified according to the four components and services that will together form the ENCASE platform. These are:

1. Front-End

2. Web-proxy Server

3. Middleware Service

4. Data Analytics Software Stack (Back-End)

The requirements description for each component is then subdivided into Functional requirements, Security and privacy requirements, and Operational requirements.