With the enhancement of technology, cyber attackers use the latest tricks and techniques to access unauthorized data and perform malicious activities in the organization’s system or network. Unfortunately, this is due to many security vulnerabilities that go undetected, forming the attack surface.
What is threat modeling?
How does threat modeling work?
Threat modeling methods
Advantages of threat modeling
Due to the impact of security vulnerabilities, cybersecurity professionals are deploying countermeasures to safeguard the systems, networks, or data. For such instances, threat modeling emerged to identify the vulnerabilities left undetected even after performing traditional security testing methods.
What is threat modeling?
Threat modeling is a process used by cybersecurity professionals to identify the application, system, network, or business process security vulnerabilities and to develop effective measures to prevent or mitigate threats. It consists of a structured process with these objectives: identify security threats and potential vulnerabilities, define threat and vulnerability criticality, and prioritize remediation methods.
How does threat modeling work?
Threat modeling works by identifying the various types of threats that can affect an application or system. Organizations analyze software architecture, business context, and other artifacts while accomplishing threat modeling. In general, organizations perform threat modeling in the designing stage of an application to help developers identify the security vulnerabilities in their design, code, or deployment.
Threat modeling methods
Various types of threat modeling methods are used to protect from cyber threats. They are as follows:
Attack tree: The attack tree is one of the oldest and most commonly used threat modeling methodologies, designed to develop a conceptual diagram illustrating how an asset or target is attacked, with the root node, leaves, and children nodes. This methodology is often combined with other threat modeling methods such as PASTA, STRIDE, etc.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS): CVSS is a standard threat modeling method used to help security teams access threats, identify the impact, and develop countermeasures. It helps organizations assess and prioritize vulnerability management processes.
DREAD: It was also developed by Microsoft, which dropped in 2008 due to a lack of consistent ratings. Many other organizations use the DREAD methods to rank and assess security threats.
OCTAVE: The Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) threat modeling methodology is a risk-based strategic assessment and planning method. It aims at assessing organizational risks in three phases:
PASTA: Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis (PASTA) is a risk-centric methodology that provides threat identification, enumeration, and scoring. Because of its static framework, it is easy to implement and understands the risks of the application.
STRIDE: It is a well-known threat modeling methodology developed by Microsoft that provides a mnemonic approach for identifying security threats in six types:
TRIKE: TRIKE is a unique and open source threat modeling method that aims at security auditing processes from cyber risk management. It offers a risk-based approach with an individual risk modelling process. The Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is generated with the requirements to understand how the system stores and manipulates data—implementing mitigation controls to prioritize the threats and then developing a risk model based on the actions, roles, assets, and threats.
VAST: Visual, Agile, Simple Threat Modeling (VAST) is an automated threat modeling method to differentiate the application and operational threat models. It is designed to integrate the workflows that require stakeholders such as developers, application architects, cybersecurity professionals, etc.
Advantages of threat modeling
Threat modeling provides a clear understanding of a software project, helping define security efforts. The process allows organizations to document identified security threats and make rational decisions on how to respond. The advantages of threat modeling are as follows:
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