Threat Modeling

Studying systems to highlight security and privacy issues.

Four key questions:

  1. What are we working on?
  2. What can go wrong?
  3. What are we going to do about it?
  4. Did we do a good enough job?

Why?

  • Understand what can go wrong
  • Highlight design and implementation issues that needs mitigation.
  • Output gives us better information to do further design, development etc.

Values

  • A culture of finding and fixing design issues over checkbox compliance.
  • People and collaboration over processes, methodologies, and tools.
  • A journey of understanding over a security or privacy snapshot.
  • Doing threat modeling over talking about it.
  • Continuous refinement over a single delivery.

Principles

  • The best use of threat modeling is to improve the security and privacy of a system through early and frequent analysis.
  • Threat modeling must align with an organization’s development practices and follow design changes in iterations that are each scoped to manageable portions of the system.
  • The outcomes of threat modeling are meaningful when they are of value to stakeholders.
  • Dialog is key to establishing the common understandings that lead to value, while documents record those understandings, and enable measurement.

Good Patterns - Do these

  • Systematic Approach: Achieve thoroughness and reproducibility by applying security and privacy knowledge in a structured manner.
  • Informed Creativity: Allow for creativity by including both craft and science.
  • Varied Viewpoints: Assemble a diverse team with appropriate subject matter experts and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Useful Toolkit: Support your approach with tools that allow you to increase your productivity, enhance your workflows, enable repeatability and provide measurability.
  • Theory into Practice: Use successfully field-tested techniques aligned to local needs, and that are informed by the latest thinking on the benefits and limits of those techniques.

Anti-Patterns - Do NOT do these

  • Hero Threat Modeler: Threat modeling does not depend on one’s innate ability or unique mindset; everyone can and should do it.
  • Admiration for the Problem: Go beyond just analyzing the problem; reach for practical and relevant solutions.
  • Tendency to Overfocus: Do not lose sight of the big picture, as parts of a model may be interdependent. Avoid exaggerating attention on adversaries, assets, or techniques.
  • Perfect Representation: It is better to create multiple threat modeling representations because there is no single ideal view, and additional representations may illuminate different problems.

Source

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