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

Reasons to Threat Model

In today's fast-paced world, there is a tendency to streamline development activity, and there are important reasons to threat model, which are covered in this section. Those include finding security bugs early, understanding your security requirements, and engineering and delivering better products.

Find Security Bugs Early

If you think about building a house, decisions you make early will have dramatic effects on security. Wooden walls and lots of ground-level windows expose you to more risks than brick construction and few windows. Either may be a reasonable choice, depending on where you're building and other factors. Once you've chosen, changes will be expensive. Sure, you can put bars over your windows, but wouldn't it be better to use a more appropriate design from the start? The same sorts of tradeoffs can apply in technology. Threat modeling will help you find design issues even before you've written a line of code, and that&apos...