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

Other Threat Trees

These trees are intended to be templates for common modes of attack. There are several tensions associated with creating such trees. First is a question of depth. A deeper, more specific tree is more helpful to those who are experts in areas other than security. Unfortunately, through specificity, it loses power to shape mental models, and it loses power to evoke related threats. Second, there is a tension between the appearance of completeness and the specificity to an operating system. For example, exploit domain trust is Windows specific, and it can be derived from either “abuse feature” or “exploit admin (authentication)” or both, depending on your perspective. As such, consider these trees and the audience who will be using them when deciding if you should use them as is or draw more layers.

Unlike the STRIDE trees shown earlier, these trees are not presented with a catalog of ways to address the threats. Such a catalog would be too...