Book Image

Threat Modeling

By : Adam Shostack
Book Image

Threat Modeling

By: Adam Shostack

Overview of this book

As more software is delivered on the Internet or operates on Internet-connected devices, the design of secure software is critical. This book will give you the confidence to design secure software products and systems and test their designs against threats. This book is the only security book to be chosen as a Dr. Dobbs Jolt Award Finalist since Bruce Schneier?s Secrets and Lies and Applied Cryptography! The book starts with an introduction to threat modeling and focuses on the key new skills that you'll need to threat model and lays out a methodology that's designed for people who are new to threat modeling. Next, you?ll explore approaches to find threats and study the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Moving ahead, you?ll manage threats and learn about the activities involved in threat modeling. You?ll also focus on threat modeling of specific technologies and find out tricky areas and learn to address them. Towards the end, you?ll shift your attention to the future of threat modeling and its approaches in your organization. By the end of this book, you?ll be able to use threat modeling in the security development lifecycle and in the overall software and systems design processes.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
7
Glossary
8
Bibliography
10
End User License Agreement

Chapter 5
Attack Libraries

Some practitioners have suggested that STRIDE is too high level, and should be replaced with a more detailed list of what can go wrong. Insofar as STRIDE being abstract, they're right. It could well be useful to have a more detailed list of common problems.

A library of attacks can be a useful tool for finding threats against the system you're building. There are a number of ways to construct such a library. You could collect sets of attack tools; either proof-of-concept code or fully developed (“weaponized”) exploit code can help you understand the attacks. Such a collection, where no modeling or abstraction has taken place, means that each time you pick up the library, each participant needs to spend time and energy creating a model from the attacks. Therefore, a library that provides that abstraction (and at a more detailed level than STRIDE) could well be useful. In this chapter, you'll learn about several higher-level libraries...