Privacy What Developers and IT Professionals Should Know

Chapter 11. Performing a Privacy Analysis

In the book Writing Secure Code, Second Edition, Michael Howard and David LeBlanc use dataflow diagrams to demonstrate the technique of completing a threat-modeling analysis. They even go on to say, “The overriding driver of threat modeling is that you cannot build secure systems until you evaluate the threats to the application with the goal of reducing the overall risk.” A similar statement can be made about building safe systems from the viewpoint of protecting the user's privacy.

Dataflow diagrams (DFDs) are not a new concept. Tom Yourdon first introduced them in 1976, in his book Piecewise Decomposition and Application Specification.^[1] The use of DFDs for threat modeling is described in Chapter ...