What Is Threat Modeling

 Threat modeling is the process of analyzing various business and technical requirements of a system, identifying the potential threats, and documenting how vulnerable these threats make the system. A threat refers to any instance where an unauthorized party accesses sensitive information, applications, or network of an organization.

The aim of the threat modeling process is to get a clear picture of various assets of the organization, the possible threats to these assets, and how and when these threats can be mitigated. The end product of threat modeling is a robust security system.

Threat Modeling Process: 5 Key Steps

1. Set objectives (What do we want to accomplish?) 

• Confidentiality to protect data against unauthorized disclosure
• Integrity to prevent unauthorized information changes
• Ability to render required services even while the system is under attack

2. Visualize (What are we building?) 

Data flow diagram: It depicts how data is designed to move through your system. It shows the operational level and clearly displays where data enters and exits each component, data stores, processes, interactions, and trust boundaries. 

Process flow diagram: It depicts how users interact and move through various use cases. It is at an application level. While DFDs focus on how your system works internally, PFDs concentrate on user and-third party interactions with your system. You can choose either one or use both.

3. Identify threats (What can go wrong?) 

In the previous step, you built the diagrams to understand your system. In this step, you will need to analyze these diagrams to understand the actual threats. At this stage, you need to figure out the various ways in which your assets can be compromised and who the potential attackers are. There are many methods of doing this. We will be covering the six most prominent methods for threat assessment modeling in the next section.  

4. Mitigate (What are we going to do about it?) 

Based on this risk analysis, you can deal with the vulnerabilities in the following ways: 

• Don’t do anything (too low risk or too difficult to make the associated threat)
• Remove the feature associated with it
• Turn the feature off or reduce the functionality
• Bring in code, infrastructure, or design fixes

5. Validate (Did we do a good job?) 

During validation, you check if all vulnerabilities have been addressed. Have all the threats been mitigated? Are the residual risks clearly documented? Once this is done, you need to decide the next steps to manage the identified threats and decide when the next iteration of threat modeling will be. Remember that threat modeling is not a one-time activity. It needs to be repeated either at scheduled intervals or during specific milestones in the application development. 

https://www.spiceworks.com/it-security/network-security/articles/what-is-threat-modeling-definition-process-examples-and-best-practices/