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

Appendix C

Attacker Lists

As discussed in Chapter 2, “Strategies for Threat Modeling,” focusing on attackers is an attractive way to make threats real. This appendix provides you with an understanding of attackers at a variety of levels of details. The first section is four lists of attackers with limited detail about each. That is followed by a discussion of “personas,” and then a fully worked out system of threat personas.

Many projects have floundered because creating these models is challenging. This appendix is presented with the hope that it will help you, and the (cynical) expectation that it will help you by helping you “fail faster.” That is, by providing these lists, you can experiment with a variety of attacker models, rather than needing to create your own to try them out. By failing faster, you can learn lessons and move along, rather than getting mired in an approach.

There is one other attacker worth considering, and that is the...