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Threat Modeling

How does threat modeling work?

Identify

  • Potential threat

  • Potential occurrence

  • Concern Priority

  • Means to eradicate or mitigate threat

Categorized

Analyze

What is STRIDE?

  • Spoofing : using someone else's credentials to gain access to otherwise inaccessible assets
  • Tampering : Changing data to mount an attack
  • Repudiation : Occurs when a user denies performing an action, but the target of the action has no way to prove otherwise
  • Information Disclosure : disclosure of information to a user who does not have permission to see it
  • Denial of Service : Reducing the ability of valid users to access resources
  • Elevation of Privilege : occurs when an unprivileged user gains privileged status

What is DREAD?

A risk-rating scheme that scores each threat (historically 1-10) across five factors and averages them to prioritize: - Damage - how bad the impact is if exploited - Reproducibility - how reliably it can be reproduced - Exploitability - the effort/skill needed to exploit it - Affected users - how many users are impacted - Discoverability - how easily the flaw is found

Microsoft originally paired DREAD with STRIDE but later deprecated it because the scores are subjective and hard to keep consistent.

Threat Modeling exercise examples

  1. Instant messaging system
  2. Password storage system
  3. Ecommerce store
  4. Given an application where a client wants to look up a service from service discovery provider