Threat Modeling Methodologies

Out of everyone’s perception, threat modelling, a lot of technical officers who did technical vulnerability management found it difficult to master, because they thought it could be as easy as carrying out the following step. For implement effective threat modeling methodologies that work for your company, it is not purely technical process, but you need to have the better understanding of what your company business is, so you can have better definition and classification and identification of the valuable asset you want to prioritize protect them for your risk management policy, before threat modeling is follow. In this post we will mention the five most used methodologies in threat modeling. Each of them have specific goals, and each of them have a different way to work with threats. Below a brief of each methodology is mentioned.

STRIDE Threat Model

STRIDE stands for Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of Service (DoS), and Elevation of privilege. A methodology developed by Microsoft used to categorize threats. It identifies six types of threats, which is what it stands for. It’s more for security experts, but it well serves as the framework for you to gather your own company assets and based on them to discover what kind of threat is likely to be related to your own context.

• Spoofing: Pretending to be someone else
• Tampering: Modifying data you shouldn’t modify
• Repudiation: Deny Something you did
• Information disclosure: To see information that you don’t have the permission to see
• Denial of Service (DoS): Compromising the availability
• Elevation of privilege: A user or program done things technically that they shouldn’t do

 

VAST Threat Model

VAST Stand for Visual, Agile, and Simple Threat modeling. In this methodology, anyone can use it even if they are not an expert in security. It is suitable as the framework for beginners but also serves well for other purposes, as long as you get the fundamental right, discover and identify assets, and prioritize them correctly first, before applying threat modelling.

 

Trike Threat Model

Trike focuses on cybersecurity risk management. Is an open source threat modeling. Trike is for small information systems. Also, Trike uses a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) to view how the data flow in the information system.

 

OCTAVE Threat Model

OCTAVE stands for Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation. Developed at Carnegie Mellon by Software Engineering institute (SEI). This methodology is designed for small organizations and focuses on non-technical risk.

 

PASTA

PASTA is short for Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis. PASTA is a methodology that uses “if I would the attacker” to identify threats and risk analysis. To use PASTA, training is required to do it successfully. It is helpful to use this framework for offensive and ethical hacking, since it focuses on penetrating the target.

 

Summary

In this post you get knowledge about the five most used methodologies in threat modeling. These five methodologies are STRIDE, VAST, Trike, OCTAVE, and PASTA. Note in the market that more than 5 threat models exist, here we are just to make it short enough to be a blog post. Whatever model you are use as your based framework, remember to adopt it or customized for your very own business context, it is in particular important to to the steps before threat modeling right: discover, identified and pritoized valuable asset, and have the risk management policy in place to guide the rest of the process.

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