Every day, new threats emerge that threaten businesses. These threats could include information disclosure without authorization, malware infections, data breaches and more.
Administrators use threat modeling to assess the risks their systems face and prioritize cybersecurity needs accordingly, thus ensuring adequate resource allocation.
What is Threat Modeling?
Threat modeling is the process of identifying potential threats to an organization’s systems and documenting their vulnerabilities, providing cybersecurity teams with vital intelligence that helps design defenses to mitigate threats and reduce security breaches.
For your specific needs, to determine the appropriate threat model you should first determine what needs protecting and prioritize your efforts. The most successful threat models take input from business stakeholders, architects, programmers and engineers as well as having an in-depth knowledge of system architecture and engineering decisions into account.
Threat modeling is an essential step in developing application security, and should be done at the start of software development. By doing so, this reduces the chances of more severe security vulnerabilities emerging later and increases their chance of being discovered and addressed before becoming serious issues.
Security architects can use it to draft and prioritize a list of security controls required for each system, which are implemented to eliminate potential threats and create a secure environment.
Threat modeling involves conducting brainstorm sessions to identify possible attackers and their assets as well as potential objectives of those attacks. Ultimately, the goal is to produce a catalog that will guide further iterations of threat analysis.
Microsoft’s STRIDE method for threat modeling has long been one of the premier strategies. This model utilizes six key behaviors to identify threats: spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service and elevation of privilege.
Visual, Agile and Simple Threat (VAST). VAST uses a set of techniques to identify potential threats to an application or operational system, and produces visual representations of them that can easily scale to any scope or area within an organization.
Trike is a risk analysis tool often employed in combination with threat modeling methods. This technique evaluates the level of threat actors pose to system assets via CRUD by rating each action they could perform (always, sometimes or never) on a three-dimensional scale.
To create an appropriate threat model for your organization, research and consult experts in the field. As this process can be complex and time-consuming, ensure it is handled by a team with nough experience and resources for proper completion.
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Threat Modeling Methodologies
No matter your level of experience in IoT security, threat modeling methodologies exist that can assist in assessing security vulnerabilities. There are methods tailored specifically for individual types of attacks while others cover all possible threats simultaneously; regardless of which approach you adopt, however, you’ll need to compile a comprehensive threat catalog in order to assess them accurately.
STRIDE methodology is one of the most popular and efficient threat models that can be utilized across diverse environments. Utilizing a mnemonic created by Microsoft engineers to enumerate threats within systems and detect vulnerabilities, it provides an easily customized framework applicable to both cyber-only systems as well as hybrid cyber-physical systems.
PASTA provides another risk-based approach to threat modeling, using both a process and set of cards that analysts can use to identify attackers, their motivations and the systems they could target – while simultaneously simulating any attacks that might happen.
This methodology can assist security teams in accounting for less common or novel attacks, as well as facilitate collaboration among developers and business stakeholders to understand an application’s inherent risk, likelihood of attack, and the possible outcomes if there was a compromise.
PASTA can be an extremely effective method, yet can be challenging and require extensive knowledge about attackers. Furthermore, its application tends to take longer than anticipated.
Data-flow diagrams (DFDs) and trust boundaries were introduced in the early 2000s as threat modeling techniques. These diagrams visualize how data moves within systems as well as interactions between users and their environments.
DFDs are an integral component of the Trike method, an approach developed as a threat-modeling framework for security auditing. It starts by creating a “requirements model,” which establishes stakeholder-approved acceptable risk levels across each asset class.
From there, threats are identified and given risk values before being analyzed to create attack graphs – giving IT teams the data needed to defend their systems long before threats pose an immediate risk.
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Attack Trees
Attack trees are one of the most frequently utilized threat modeling techniques and can be combined with other approaches to create an extensive model that allows security specialists to visualize all possible ways attackers could gain entry to systems and their content.
Security specialists use attack trees to map possible attacker goals, then map potential routes that they might take toward reaching that goal. Certain routes may be more challenging or have greater impacts than others; security specialists must evaluate all options that can lead to successful outcomes for victims in order to create effective attack trees.
Attack trees provide security professionals with an efficient method of assessing where the most vulnerable areas of their system lie, as well as what steps must be taken to secure them. Attack trees also help prioritize which threats to focus on and which should be left alone.
Attack trees can also help security experts evaluate potential paths taken by attackers in approaching targets, providing the means for comparing costs per path and identifying which options may be less costly or more expensive than others.
Security analysts can create an attack tree to read someone else’s email, by setting an initial goal and mapping potential ways an attacker might reach it. They then assign dollar values for each node in their tree.
Assigning dollar values to each node in an attack tree is a reliable way of evaluating which strategies are more expensive or easier to implement than others, providing insight into which attacks have more chance of success while others might require specific equipment or have other ramifications on operations of targets.
Attack tree generators offer more sophisticated features, such as indicators that quantify costs and operational complexity, along with different categories and levels of consequences that help users assess how an attack impacts systems.
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STRIDE
Threats are defined as potential dangers that pose risks to an entity – be it an individual, group or company – such as cybercrime and vulnerabilities in software code exploiting suppliers. They could come in many forms such as hackers breaking into suppliers’ computers or exploiting vulnerabilities in applications.
Developers need a threat modeling methodology like STRIDE in order to mitigate potential threats, which is widely utilized by cybersecurity specialists and can identify cybersecurity threats affecting a system, prioritise them based on impact and likelihood, and integrate them into secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) processes.
Microsoft created STRIDE as one of the premier threat modeling methodologies, to ensure its products met CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability). Furthermore, this model protects applications and systems against threats of spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure or denial-of-service attacks.
By looking at a system’s processes, data stores, data flows and trust boundaries, STRIDE allows engineers to assess its security vulnerabilities more precisely and develop defenses against each threat.
When an application is vulnerable to data tampering, information disclosure or denial-of-service attacks, teams can utilize access control logs, secure socket layer/transport layer security or IPSec authentication as protective mechanisms. They could also implement other tools like reverse proxy that protect against such risks.
Teams may create defenses against an elevation of privilege attack by creating defenses against it. Such attacks allow an attacker to elevate their privileges and take dangerous actions with increased power.
Threat models can help reveal monitoring, logging and alerting needs that might have been missed during design. Furthermore, cloud computing poses unique risks and threats not seen elsewhere on-premises.
STRIDE can assist in the assessment and protection of emerging risks and threats in corporates, especially cloud computing environments which is becoming more widely adopted by corporate America. By using STRIDE you can identify vulnerabilities to defend against attacks within cloud environments as well as implement any necessary fixes to ensure optimal defenses are in place to defend against attacks in these environments.
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