Designing secure software offers a wide range of benefits, from lowering the number of human hours spent fixing security vulnerabilities in production to limiting financial losses and regulatory penalties, thus gaining a competitive advantage and increasing customer loyalty.
Threat modeling is a crucial component of the "Secure by Design" guiding principles. This Refcard will provide the key fundamentals of threat modeling, core practices for secure implementation, and key elements of conducting successful threat model reviews. Exploring the significance of modern tools for automating and streamlining threat modeling processes, we will look at improving the accuracy of findings and facilitating integration and collaboration among software and security teams throughout the software development lifecycle.
Threat modeling is the ultimate shift left approach. It can be used to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities before a single line of code is written. Employing threat modeling methodologies should be your first step toward building networks, systems, and applications that will be secure by design. STRIDE is a model of threats that can be used as a framework in ensuring secure application design.
STRIDE - Threat Modeling Methodology
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Abstract
An interconnected world with an increasing number of systems, products, and services relying on the availability, confidentiality, and integrity of sensitive information is vulnerable to attacks and incidents. Unfortunately, the threat landscape expands and new threats, threat agents, and attack vectors emerge at all times. Defending against these threats requires that organizations are aware of such threats and threat agents. Threat modeling can be used as part of security risk analysis to systematically iterate over possible threat scenarios.
The motivation for this research came from the constantly growing need to acquire better tools to tackle the broad and expanding threat landscape present. One such tool to help to categorize and systematically evaluate the security of a system, product, or service, is threat modeling.
Introduction to the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)
Security Development Lifecycle is one of the four Secure Software Pillars. By pillars, I mean the essential activities that ensure secure software.
SDL can be defined as the process for embedding security artifacts in the entire software cycle.
