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

Phones and One-Time Token Authenticators

Chapter 9, “Trade-Offs When Addressing Threats,” describes a threat model (shown in Figure E.3) that illustrates how threat models can be used to drive the evolution of an architecture. This model is also a useful example of a focused threat model. It ignores a great deal of important mechanisms, and shows how the trust boundaries and requirements can quickly identify threats. It should not be taken as commentary on any particular commercial system, some of which may mitigate threats shown here. Also, many of these systems support text to speech that can read the code to a person using an old-fashioned telephone; the alternatives suggested in the following material do not have that capability.

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Figure E.3 A one-time token authentication system

The Scenario

A wide variety of systems are designed to send auxiliary passwords—one-time tokens (OTT)—over the phone network to someone's phone. During an enrollment...