Risk Centric Threat Modeling: Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis

CHAPTER 1THREAT MODELING OVERVIEW

DEFINITIONS

[Application] Threat Modeling – a strategic process aimed at considering possible attack scenarios and vulnerabilities within a proposed or existing application environment for the purpose of clearly identifying risk and impact levels.

Definitions for any type of terminology are necessary evils. While seemingly elementary and potentially annoying, they provide a common ground from which to build. Providing a well-constructed definition also level-sets threat modeling's intended design as a process-oriented control for application security, versus interpretations that mutate its intent and true capability.

In this book, the expression “threat modeling” is reserved for software development and application security efforts. Within the topical boundaries of application security, the aforementioned definition provides some fundamental terms that should resonate with anyone who understands the very nature of security risk management and has implemented the threat modeling machine.

A closer examination of the definition provided reveals greater insights into the essential components that are threat modeling. The first emphasized term, strategic, describes a quality of threat modeling reflected in its ability to anticipate threats via calculated and simulated attack patterns. Each major function within the threat modeling process requires a great deal of consideration and anticipation of multiple risk factors influenced by threat, vulnerability, ...