As hacking and malware attacks become more prominent, organizations must adopt a sound threat modeling process to reduce risks while protecting data, customers, and business reputation.
To make penetration testing effective and efficient, it should be implemented as an automated, repeatable process that occurs regularly or at specific milestones of the application development cycle. Testing could focus on attacks or assets depending on which methodology is chosen.
What is Threat Modeling?
Threat modeling is a framework through which cybersecurity professionals can identify potential risks and vulnerabilities using various techniques. All methods provide an in-depth view of their environment while aiding defenders to find ways to mitigate threats as efficiently as possible.
Threat models should be developed during the software design phase but may also be created during development, testing, or post-production validation. Regular reviews of threat models must take place to ensure all identified vulnerabilities have been resolved; additionally, they must stay up-to-date as the threat environment shifts or new technologies enter the marketplace.
Attack Tree Identification and Response Evaluation (STRIDE) is one of the most widely adopted threat modeling methodologies, offering teams easy adoption. This simple yet effective methodology focuses on the risk associated with attacks against an application's functionality rather than the system architecture itself. It makes use cases much simpler for developers and testers by outlining an attacker's goal and their methods for reaching it.
There are also other effective approaches, such as DREAD and PASTA. While DREAD emphasizes the business impact of an attack, PASTA takes a more technical approach that uses an actor-asset-action matrix to evaluate risks and develop mitigation strategies. Tools such as Trike and VAST can automate threat modeling processes. Whatever method is chosen, stakeholders must remain involved throughout the process and document all results easily accessible for everyone so they can keep security considerations in mind when making application decisions.
How does threat modeling work?
As more systems transition to digital formats, we face an ever-increasing array of potential threats. These range from hacking and distributed denial-of-service attacks to theft of sensitive data or information - both large and small organizations are vulnerable. Threat modeling helps minimize these risks by identifying vulnerabilities early during software development and mitigating them before malicious actors can exploit them.
Threat modeling can range from something as straightforward as brainstorming sessions with your team to using sophisticated software and hardware tools to improve security on large, interconnected systems. At its core, threat modeling involves understanding your application's structure and identifying its most valuable assets (like account data or intellectual property) to identify and prioritize security requirements during its design phase - thus cutting down time spent redesigning, refactoring, and fixing security bugs while producing more secure products more quickly.
Threat modeling relies heavily on creating attack scenarios to assess vulnerabilities within your system and building an attacker profile to identify the most likely ways an adversary could penetrate it. It takes an approach similar to risk management methodologies like STRIDE or CVSS but with additional cost and impact evaluation benefits for every identified vulnerability.
Once threat models are completed, they must be thoroughly validated. This may involve reviewing them to ensure accurate results or running a suite of tests against your application to detect vulnerabilities you might have missed.
Best practices of threat modeling
Threat modeling should be part of your software development life cycle (SDLC). Including threat modeling early in development will provide a secure view of your application and help identify security flaws that traditional testing methods or code reviews might have missed.
Engaging all stakeholders is another essential practice in threat modeling to ensure everyone's perspective is considered and that there will be consistent outcomes between teams. Finally, selecting an effective methodology (STRIDE, PASTA, TRIKE, or Visual Agile and Simple Threat Modeling (VAST)) that matches your SDLC processes is paramount to ensure its success.
VAST is an advanced threat modeling tool that enables users to build threat graphs containing threat levels, attackers, and countermeasures. Furthermore, it offers a vulnerability score that considers both the impact of an attack and existing countermeasures; its values depend on various factors, including the likelihood and severity of attacks and how long ago they first emerged.
Threat modeling is an invaluable asset to any software development team, but it comes with its challenges. Threat modeling requires time-intensive work that may delay software development life cycle processes, yet, used appropriately, it can improve software security while helping organizations meet their business goals more easily - and those benefits cannot be overlooked!
Why Do We Need Security Threat Modeling?
Every day brings news of cyber attacks - hacking, ransomware attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and information disclosure without authorization- all potential vulnerabilities that cost companies financially and user trust. Threat modeling helps companies prevent these cyberattacks by identifying and prioritizing vulnerabilities to manage threats effectively.
Threat modeling should begin at the early design and development stage, allowing security features to be built-in early. Doing this saves time and money, as adding security controls in this stage can be more affordable than later when changes require more costly implementation efforts.
When conducting threat modeling, all relevant stakeholders must provide input, including business stakeholders, the application architect, developers, and IT staff. Doing this ensures that the modeling fully covers all aspects of an app, including infrastructure, potential attackers, and the threat landscape. Furthermore, the team can better identify possible attackers,motives, and threats from this perspective.
The first step of threat modeling is creating a visual model of the system. This can be accomplished using various methods, such as data flow diagrams or attack trees. Data flow diagrams show how data moves through an application while pinpointing potential entry points, while attack trees offer more visual analysis; they depict how an attacker could potentially penetrate an application by drawing out assets and vulnerabilities as trunks and branches of an attack tree.
Once models have been constructed, the next step should be analyzing them to assess damage potential, exploitability, and discoverability. Once vulnerabilities have been identified, mitigation tactics are deployed to lessen their effects, including adding or updating security controls as necessary.
Threat Modeling Methodologies
Threat modeling approaches range from building attack trees and assessing risk to scoring systems like CVSS. One such scoring system takes into account inherent properties of vulnerabilities and existing countermeasures to protect assets against them while also considering their effect on assets being targeted by these methods.
STRIDE is another method utilizing attack trees for identification of threats, as well as analyzing their likelihood and impact. PASTA (Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis) elevates threat modeling to a strategic level with input from all stakeholders instead of just IT or security teams alone.
Companies today face an array of threats that threaten software and systems. Threat modeling can assist companies in detecting easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities as quickly as possible and reacting promptly when new risks emerge.
Threat modeling should ideally occur during the design stage of new applications or systems to identify vulnerabilities before deployment. But revisiting threat models periodically is also key; any change to your system, environment, or threat landscape should trigger a review to ensure it is still accurate and complete. It is also beneficial to regularly train employees in threat modeling to identify potential issues immediately when they arise, helping reduce cyber attack risk.
