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

How To Use This Book

You should start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start, even if you already know how to threat model, because it lays out a framework that will help you understand the rest of the book.

The Four-Step Framework

This book introduces the idea that you should see threat modeling as composed of steps which accomplish subgoals, rather than as a single activity. The essential questions which you ask to accomplish those subgoals are:

  1. What are you building?
  2. What can go wrong with it once it's built?
  3. What should you do about those things that can go wrong?
  4. Did you do a decent job of analysis?

The methods you use in each step of the framework can be thought of like Lego blocks. When working with Legos, you can snap in other Lego blocks. In Chapter 1, you'll use a data flow diagram to model what you're building, STRIDE to help you think about what can go wrong and what you should do about it, and a checklist to see if you did a decent job...