Abstract:

Software systems can be treated as complex systems because of the features such as numerous nodes, complicated relationships among the nodes, evolving with time and selforganized criticality. In the field of software security, the analysis of software architecture always plays an important role. The software architecture has its own brittleness which reflects in the cascading failure and collapse of the whole software system during its running. We treat the software system as a complex system for the first time, and analyze the brittleness of the software architecture. Then the max collapse path and the brittleness source regarding the “data abstraction and objectoriented” software architecture style are given through the ant colony algorithm and the GROD algorithm, which can have profound implications for the design and monitoring of the software system both in theory and practice.

Key words: software architecture, software security, complex system, complex network, brittleness