  System security assurance provides the confidence that security features,
practices, procedures, and architecture of software systems mediate and enforce
the security policy and are resilient against security failure and attacks.
Alongside the significant benefits of security assurance, the evolution of new
information and communication technology (ICT) introduces new challenges
regarding information protection. Security assurance methods based on the
traditional tools, techniques, and procedures may fail to account new
challenges due to poor requirement specifications, static nature, and poor
development processes. The common criteria (CC) commonly used for security
evaluation and certification process also comes with many limitations and
challenges. In this paper, extensive efforts have been made to study the
state-of-the-art, limitations and future research directions for security
assurance of the ICT and cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a wide range of
domains. We conducted a systematic review of requirements, processes, and
activities involved in system security assurance including security
requirements, security metrics, system and environments and assurance methods.
We highlighted the challenges and gaps that have been identified by the
existing literature related to system security assurance and corresponding
solutions. Finally, we discussed the limitations of the present methods and
future research directions.
