What is threat modeling? (original) (raw)

Introduction to threat modeling

By systematically and proactively assessing potential risks, engineering teams can develop mitigation strategies that strengthen an application’s overall security posture. This process involves building threat models by reviewing and validating the software architecture before the code is deployed.

How does threat modeling work?

Rather than reacting to security incidents after they occur, threat modeling helps teams anticipate potential attacks and address vulnerabilities before they become real threats. It begins by identifying who might attack the system, their motivations, and the possible attack vectors they could exploit. This process involves mapping out the system’s architecture, analyzing data flows, and pinpointing potential weak spots where attackers could gain access or disrupt functionality.

By simulating real-world threats, teams can assess the likelihood and impact of different attack scenarios, prioritize risks, and implement countermeasures before deployment. This approach strengthens security while integrating seamlessly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring that security considerations are built into the system from the ground up.

Benefits of threat modeling

Threat modeling is critical for securing systems, supporting engineering workflows, and fostering communication across teams. Instituting threat modeling during the design and planning phases of production can identify and remediate threats when they are relatively easy to resolve, lowering the overall development cost of production. Here’s how threat modeling helps your organization:

Proactive security and risk management

• Detecting threats early helps identify vulnerabilities in the design phase, reducing the risk of costly security breaches later.
• Assessing risks upfront provides a clearer understanding of potential security threats and their impact on applications and systems.
• Prioritizing critical threats ensures that resources are focused on mitigating the most significant risks first.
• Addressing security preemptively in development is more cost-effective than fixing vulnerabilities after deployment.

Enhanced system understanding and design

• Reducing the attack surface minimizes potential entry points for attackers and strengthens overall security.
• Eliminating single points of failure improves system resilience by diversifying security controls.
• Building security into system architecture improves its overall security posture and reduces vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
• Embedding security considerations early leads to better design decisions and prevents security from becoming an afterthought.

Better collaboration and communication

• Encouraging cross-functional collaboration ensures that developers, security teams, and other stakeholders work together to identify and mitigate threats early.
• Improving communication helps teams document risks, align on mitigation strategies, and ensure security considerations are clearly understood across the organization.
• Standardizing security processes establishes a repeatable approach for consistent risk assessment and mitigation.

Adaptability to evolving threats

• Staying ahead of emerging threats helps organizations prevent vulnerabilities rather than react to attacks.
• Continuously refining security strategies keeps defenses aligned with the latest threat intelligence.
• Fostering a security culture encourages teams to proactively assess and mitigate risks throughout their development workflows.

What is the threat modeling process?

Threat modeling consists of three key steps:

1. Model the system – Identify the assets to analyze, such as the architectural system, security controls, or threat agents. Then, diagram the system using a component diagram that provides a high-level overview of the system architecture and its data flows.
2. Conduct a threat analysis – Follow a proven threat modeling methodology to analyze specific threat types, identify potential vulnerabilities, and quantify risk.
3. Prioritize threats – Use threat modeling tools to prioritize risks by creating threat scores. Once you identify the threats that matter most, you’ll want to come up with mitigation strategies, such as changing firewall configurations or setting up multi-factor authentication.

Threat modeling frameworks and methodologies

Most proven methodologies for identifying threats fall into checklist-based approaches, which consider types of threats using a checklist or template. Some teams also take a more creative approach to developing a threat model.

Let’s look at some of the most popular threat modeling frameworks and methodologies.

STRIDE

STRIDE is a threat model that accounts for the different ways an attacker might try to compromise a system. It helps teams systematically identify security threats by categorizing them into six types:

• Spoofing – Impersonating a user or system.
• Tampering – Modifying data or code maliciously.
• Repudiation – Performing actions that cannot be traced.
• Information disclosure – Exposing sensitive data.
• Denial of service – Disrupting system availability.
• Elevation of privilege – Gaining unauthorized access.

DREAD

The DREAD threat model prioritizes threats by based on their potential impact, helping security teams evaluate risks using a scoring system. It assesses threats using five criteria:

• Damage – The potential impact of an attack.
• Reproducibility – How easily the attack can be repeated.
• Exploitability – The effort required to exploit the vulnerability.
• Affected users – The number of people or systems impacted.
• Discoverability – How easy it is to find the vulnerability.

OCTAVE

OCTAVE (Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation) is a risk-based approach to threat modeling that focuses on identifying and assessing risks to an organization's most critical assets. Unlike other methodologies that emphasize technical vulnerabilities, OCTAVE takes a business-centric view, helping organizations prioritize security efforts based on operational impact.

PASTA

PASTA (Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis) is a risk-centric framework that simulates attacks to identify threats and manage risks. It emphasizes:

• Aligning security threats with business objectives.
• Assessing the impact of potential attacks.
• Using attack simulations to strengthen security defenses.

TRIKE

TRIKE is a risk-based threat modeling methodology designed to create security models based on risk analysis. It emphasizes defining system requirements, mapping risks, and assigning threat levels based on an asset-centric approach.

VAST

VAST (Visual, Agile, and Simple Threat modeling) is a scalable framework designed for DevOps and Agile environments. It focuses on automated, visual threat modeling to improve security workflows without slowing down development cycles.

NIST

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides guidelines for conducting threat modeling as part of broader cybersecurity risk management. NIST’s approach is often used in compliance-driven environments and offers a structured methodology for identifying threats and vulnerabilities.

Many engineering teams use a variety of tools to develop their threat modeling. For instance, the GitHub engineering team relies on the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool and OWASP’s Threat Dragon to map out APIs, dependencies, datastores, and authentication mechanisms across the entire application.

Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool

The Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool makes threat modeling easier for developers and non-developers alike by providing more ways to visualize threats across the software architecture. By focusing on design analysis, the tool allows anyone to lay out the security design of their systems, analyze those designs for potential security issues, and suggest mitigations.

Threat Dragon

Threat Dragon creates threat modeling diagrams, which provide a visual overview of the many components, threat surfaces, and flow of data across the software architecture. Threat Dragon can also be automated to auto-generate threats and mitigations.

Both tools help provide a visual overview of important components to consider, including APIs, dependencies, and databases. This can be useful when teams look to meet security compliance requirements during auditing.

Best practices for effective threat modeling

When building or editing a threat model, you’ll want to consider the following best practices:

Define the scope and depth of analysis. Before you build your threat model, determine the scope of the project with stakeholders. You’ll also want to break down the depth of analysis among your development team. This is when you should set a cadence for performing your assessment, whether that’s every few months or once per year.

Collaborate and communicate. Threat modeling is a collaborative exercise between developers and security teams, which means both teams should have a say on the planning, design, and review of an effective threat model. Developers and security teams should communicate their goals and expectations from the start of the process.

Visualize your threat modeling. Once you’ve established your threat modeling strategy, you’ll want to create a diagram of the system, including all the major components such as application servers, databases, and data warehouses. Make sure to include the way data interacts and flows among these components.

Consider the entire system holistically. When building your diagram, it’s important to consider every aspect of the system. For instance, you’ll want to consider all the potential paths a threat agent could take that could lead to an attack. This can help you determine which security controls are missing, weak, and need to be fortified.

Integrate with existing processes. To help your team adapt to the addition of new security tools and processes, integrate threat modeling with your existing code security processes, as well as your existing application security (AppSec) processes.

As threat modeling becomes more embedded into DevSecOps workflows, many teams are also exploring ways to make the process faster and more scalable. Automation and AI are emerging as valuable tools to support this shift.

How can threat modeling leverage automation and AI?

Traditional threat modeling relies heavily on manual processes to assess security risks, which can be time-intensive and challenging to scale in fast-moving DevSecOps environments. As development cycles accelerate and threats quickly evolve, security teams need more efficient ways to identify and mitigate risks.

Automation in threat modeling streamlines processes by automatically analyzing system architectures, mapping attack surfaces, and prioritizing risks based on predefined criteria. This helps security assessments keep pace with rapid software development and supports teams in making faster, more informed decisions.

AI enhances threat modeling by detecting patterns, predicting attack vectors, and improving risk analysis. Machine learning models can process large datasets to uncover vulnerabilities faster than manual methods. However, AI has limitations—it requires high-quality training data, lacks human intuition, and can sometimes generate false positives or miss nuanced threats.

Ultimately, automation and AI improve efficiency by reducing the time and effort needed for security assessments so teams can focus on mitigating the most critical risks. While AI-powered threat modeling is still evolving, incorporating automation in security workflows enables a more scalable, proactive approach to cybersecurity.

Wrapping up

As organizations mature their security practices, threat modeling remains a vital part of strengthening application and system security. Whether you’re building your first threat model or refining an existing process, incorporating threat modeling into your workflows helps teams stay ahead of evolving risks and build more secure systems.