Threat Modeling

CHAPTER 3STRIDE

As you learned in Chapter 1, “Dive in and Threat Model!,” STRIDE is an acronym that stands for Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege. The STRIDE approach to threat modeling was invented by Loren Kohnfelder and Praerit Garg (Kohnfelder, 1999). This framework and mnemonic was designed to help people developing software identify the types of attacks that software tends to experience.

The method or methods you use to think through threats have many different labels: finding threats, threat enumeration, threat analysis, threat elicitation, threat discovery. Each connotes a slightly different flavor of approach. Do the threats exist in the software or the diagram? Then you're finding them. Do they exist in the minds of the people doing the analysis? Then you're doing analysis or elicitation. No single description stands out as always or clearly preferable, but this book generally talks about finding threats as a superset of all these ideas. Using STRIDE is more like an elicitation technique, with an expectation that you or your team understand the framework and know how to use it. If you're not familiar with STRIDE, the extensive tables and examples are designed to teach you how to use it to discover threats.

This chapter explains what STRIDE is and why it's useful, including sections covering each component of the STRIDE mnemonic. Each threat-specific section provides a deeper explanation of the threat, ...