Software Engineering Institute

System Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) is a process model that was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, with Nancy Mead as Principal Investigator [Mead 05a].The SQUARE work was supported by the Army Research Office through grant number DAAD19-02-1-0389 (“Perpetually Available and Secure Information Systems”) to Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab. It provides a means for eliciting, categorizing, and prioritizing security requirements for information technology systems and applications. The focus of the model is to build security concepts into the early stages of the development life cycle. The model can also be used for documenting and analyzing the security aspects of fielded systems and for steering future improvements and modifications to those systems.