Abstract
Risk analysis is an important tool for developers to establish the appropriate protection level of a system. Unfortunately, the shifting environment of components and component-based systems is not adequately addressed by traditional risk analysis methods. This paper addresses this problem from a theoretical perspective by proposing a denotational model for component-based risk analysis. In order to model the probabilistic aspect of risk, we represent the behaviour of a component by a probability distribution over communication histories. The overall goal is to provide a theoretical foundation facilitating an improved understanding of risk in relation to components and component-based system development.