Threat Modeling

Threat Modelling

Threat modelling is a method of improving application, system, or business process security by identifying objectives and vulnerabilities and then creating measures to minimize or reduce the consequences of system threats. It aids in understanding the security needs of a system or process – everything that is mission-critical, confidential, or contains valuable data. It is a methodical and structured procedure aimed at identifying possible risks and vulnerabilities in order to limit the risk to IT resources. It also assists IT administrators in understanding the effect of risks, quantifying their severity, and putting controls in place. Threat modelling is the most significant aspect of software design and development in terms of software security. Without analyzing and mitigating threats, it is hard to design applications and systems that meet with company security policy, privacy and legal requirements.

Importance of Threat Modelling

Any application or system must be designed to resist cyberattacks. However, determining the security standards required to do this might be difficult. Attackers think and act differently from developers and users. Threat modelling is a positive process of finding dangers that are not often evaluated or discovered through code reviews and other sorts of audits. It helps a project team to assess the security controls an application need to build effective countermeasures against possible attacks and how to address problems early on. This method results in considerably more secure applications, and by prioritizing expected risks, resources are employed more effectively. Threat models are an essential component of the cybersecurity development process. Developers may embed security into a project during the development and maintenance stages when threat modelling is part of the DevOps process. This avoids typical omissions including failing to verify input, poor authentication, insufficient error handling, and failing to encrypt data.

What is the Threat modelling process?

There are numerous threat modelling frameworks and approaches available. However, the key phases in the majority of these processes are comparable.

1. Build a team. All stakeholders, including company owners, developers, network architects, security specialists, and C-level executives, should be represented on this team. A diversified team will provide a more comprehensive threat model.
2. Define the scope. Define and characterize the model's scope. Is it, for example, based on an application, a network, or the application and the infrastructure on which it runs? Make a list of all the components and data that will be used, and then map them to architectural and data flow diagrams. Each type of data must be categorized.
3. Identify the most likely threats. Analyze where dangers exist for all components that are threat targets. This what-if exercise generates wide, technical, and surprising threat scenarios, as well as threat or attack trees, to find potential vulnerabilities or flaws that might lead to compromise or failure. Threat modelling technologies can assist in automating and streamlining this stage.
4. Each threat should be ranked. Determine the amount of risk posed by each danger and rank them to prioritize risk mitigation. A basic but effective way is to multiply a threat's damage potential by the chance of it occurring.
5. Implement mitigating measures. Determine ways to mitigate each risk or lower it to an acceptable level. Risk can be avoided, transferred, reduced, or accepted.
6. Record the outcomes. Document all results and actions so that future changes to the application, threat landscape, and operational environment can be swiftly reviewed and the threat model updated.

Methodologies and frameworks for threat modelling

Data flow diagrams were used in early modelling approaches to depict how data flowed through an application or system. They were, however, insufficient for current applications, which are deployed in highly networked settings with various users and devices connecting to them. Process flow diagrams are increasingly widely employed. They depict an application or system from the standpoint of user interactions and how possible attackers may attempt to navigate the programme. This makes identifying and prioritizing possible risks simpler.

Attack trees are also used to illustrate assaults on a system, with the tree root representing the aim of an attack and the leaves representing several methods an attack may achieve that goal. Assault trees can be created for particular application components or to examine a specific sort of attack. An attack tree depicts the potential vulnerabilities that might arise from a given flaw in a threat-modeled application or system.

There have been several threat modelling approaches and frameworks established. Attack-centric ones are concerned with the sorts of probable assaults, whereas asset-centric ones are concerned with the assets that must be safeguarded. The following are the most prevalent approaches:

1. Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected users, Discoverability (DREAD)? It is a quantitative risk analysis that ranks, compares, and prioritizes the severity of a cyberthreat.
2. National Institute of Standards and Technology's Guide to Data-Centric System Threat Modeling It focuses on safeguarding certain data kinds within systems. It simulates components of assault and defense for specific data.
3. Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation (OCTAVE) ?It offers a customizable asset- and risk-based strategic evaluation for individual security objectives and risk management. Carnegie Mellon University created it for the Department of Defense.
4. Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis (PASTA) This is a seven-step, attack-centric methodology that considers business impact analysis and compliance requirements while correlating technical needs with business objectives
5. STRIDE? It's a component of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle. It recognizes system elements, events, and boundaries before deploying a collection of known threats. Security teams can use it to detect possible dangers.
6. Trike It is an open source, risk-centric technique that assures each asset's allocated risk rating is acceptable to all parties.
7. Visual, Agile, and Simple Threat? It is built on ThreatModeler, an automated threat modelling tool meant to integrate into an Agile software development environment and offer developers and security teams with actionable results.

Threat modeling Tools

It is not an easy task. There are an infinite number of potential risks. Even for a modest project, it makes sense to employ a threat modelling tool to save time and money.

Threat modelling tools make the process more organized and reproducible by reducing its complexity. This decreases the amount of resources required to construct and maintain a threat model from scratch. A good threat modelling tool allows users to see, develop, prepare for, and forecast many possible dangers. The key features tools should have include:

• ease of input for both system information and security rules;
• ease of input for both system information and security rules;?
• threat intelligence feed to ensure the most recent identified threats are taken into account; threat dashboard with suggested mitigation strategies;?
• mitigation dashboard that integrates with an issue tracker like Jira;
• reports for compliance and stakeholders