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

Personas and Archetypes

It's possible to start from a simple list of attacker archetypes, such as those shown in the previous section. When doing so, it's easy to find yourself arguing about the resources or capabilities of such an archetype, and needing to flesh them out. For example, what if your terrorist is state-sponsored, and has access to government labs? These questions make the attacker-centric approach start to resemble “personas,” which are often used to help think about human interface issues. You can use lessons from that community to inform your approach.

Although he didn't invent the word, usability pioneer Alan Cooper developed the concept of personas in his 1998 book, “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” (SAMS, 1999). In more recent work, “About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design” (Wiley, 2012), Cooper and his colleagues integrate personas into a more in-depth process, and stress that personas are based...