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

Sample for You to Model

You can use the models presented above as training models with answer keys. (That is, use the software model in Figure E.1 and the operational model in Figure E.2 and find threats against them yourself. You can treat the example threats as an answer key; but if you do, please don't feel limited to or constrained by them. There are other example threats.) In contrast this section presents a model without an answer key. It's a lightly edited version of a class exercise that was created by Michael Howard and used at Microsoft for years. It's included with their kind permission. I've personally taught many classes using this model, and it is sufficiently detailed for newcomers to threat modeling to find many threats.

Background

This tool, named iNTegrity, is a simple file-integrity checking tool that reads resources, such as files in the filesystem, determining whether any files or registry keys have been changed since the last check. This is performed...