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 9
Trade-Offs When Addressing Threats

After you create a list of threats, you should consider whether standard approaches will work. It is often faster to do so than to assess the risk trade-offs and the variety of ways you might deal with the problem. Of course, it's helpful to understand that there are ways to manage risks other than the tactics and technologies you learned about in Chapter 8, “Defensive Tactics and Technologies,” and those more complex approaches are the subject of this chapter.

For each threat in your list, you need to make one or more decisions. The first decision is your strategy: Should you accept the risk, address it, avoid it, or transfer it? If you're going to address it, you must next decide when, and then how? There are a variety of ways to think about when to address the threat. Table 9.1 provides an example to make these choices appear more concrete and to help separate them:

Table 9.1 Sample Risk Approach Tracking Table

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