Threat Modeling: From Novice To Expert

Define threat modeling fundamentals, answer what, why, when, and who, and clarify key terminologies with practical examples while linking to industry definitions and core risk concepts.

Learn how everyday actions model threat, vulnerability, risk, and controls by securing assets like a house, jewels, and a TV with locks, safes, and pins.

Explore basic threat modeling terminologies, including assets, vulnerabilities, threats, threat agents, impact, likelihood, risk, mitigation, controls, countermeasures, policies, and safeguards.

Identify threats in the application and mitigate them with countermeasures to reduce risk, following threat modeling definitions from OWASP, Microsoft, IBM, and the Cloud Security Alliance.

Learn the definition of risk in threat modeling as the probability of a threat exploiting a vulnerability combined with the impact, and explore risk analysis, risk treatment, and response.

Determine risk level from the likelihood of a threat exploiting a vulnerability and its impact, using a three-level risk matrix. See how patching and organizational response shape risk, risk treatment.

Perform risk analysis to evaluate each identified threat by likelihood and impact, determine risk levels, and prioritize risks using qualitative and quantitative ratings within threat modeling.

Apply risk treatment after assessing risk, selecting among avoid, accept, transfer, or mitigate to respond to cybersecurity risks; mitigation lowers risk to an acceptable level, e.g., via multi-factor authentication.

Identify threats early in the software development life cycle, prioritize risks, and implement controls through collaboration among developers, architects, and security professionals for security by design.

Threat modeling should occur primarily in the design phase of the SDLC, with opportunities in other stages, to proactively identify threats and recommend mitigations amid changes and third party components.

Recap the section on threat modeling, including identifying threats, mitigating them with controls, and assessing risk; emphasizes early design phase and broad stakeholder involvement.

Learn how to threat model an application through five steps: define objectives, decompose the system, identify threats, analyze and treat risks. Conclude with documenting the threat model and recommendations.

Define objectives by identifying the business need, users, and security and compliance requirements for the application. Assess domain, exposure, and attack surfaces to guide threat modeling within the project timeline.

Assess the application by decomposing it into assets, data, trust, boundaries, and dependencies, then map data flows and encryption states to identify threats.

Identify vulnerabilities, threats, and threat agents; map assets and data entry exit points across trust boundaries and dependencies, then prioritize threats by likelihood and impact to guide risk response.

Mitigate top risks with appropriate controls and countermeasures, balancing proactive and reactive measures against environment, users, threat agents, accessibility, and cost.

Validate the threat modeling work by documenting outcomes in a threat model report that captures data flow diagrams, threats, vulnerabilities, risks, and recommended controls.

recaps the five steps of threat modeling: define objectives, assess the application, analyze risks, respond with controls, and generate a threat model report with mitigations and data flow diagram.

Explore asset-centric, attacker-centric, and vulnerability-centric threat modeling approaches, focusing on protecting critical assets, attacker incentives, and finding flaws in features and functions.

The asset centric approach, also risk centric, protects an organization’s critical assets, such as servers, databases, and storage, by assessing business impact and the attacker's value.

Adopt the attacker-centric approach by focusing on attacker profile—goals, skill set, and motivation—to assess risk to confidentiality, integrity, and availability and guide mitigation.

Apply the application-centric approach to evaluate assets, vulnerabilities, and threats, determine risks, and identify controls, using data flow diagrams across trust levels for assets like browser, web server, and database.

Explore attacker centric, asset centric, and application centric threat modeling approaches, and learn when each perspective best protects assets, data, and application functions.

Learn threat modeling approaches by examining asset-centric, attacker-centric, and application-centric perspectives. Identify how protecting critical assets, modeling attacker profiles, and analyzing data flow guide secure design decisions.

Discover how threat modeling methodologies define the steps to threat model an application, using application-centric, asset-centric, and attack-centric approaches; this lecture introduces stride, dread, and pasta for deeper exploration.

Stride threat modeling takes an application-centric approach, categorizing threats as spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege, and mapping them to security properties.

Assess threats using the dread framework by evaluating damage potential, reproducibility, exploitability, affected users, and discoverability to compute dread scores. Prioritize threats and determine mitigations based on their dread scores.

Explore the pasta threat modeling methodology, a risk-centric seven-step approach for mature organizations to identify threats, model attacks, assess risks, and align security with business context.

Select threat modeling methods by context, using stride for simple apps, dread for precise risk, and pasta for comprehensive, cross-domain assessments across business, technology, and operations.

Recap three threat modeling methodologies: stride, dread, and pasta, and their application-centric focus on security properties, risk prioritization, and multi-platform assessments.

Define the objectives of a public facing web application and decompose it into assets, data flow, entry and exit points, and trust zones and boundaries to guide threat modeling.

Explore how a data flow diagram visualizes data flow across external entities, processes, and storage, marks trust zones and boundaries, and guides threat modeling for web applications.

Identify vulnerabilities from the dft, rank threats, and mitigate by tightening authentication (t001), encrypting data (t002), and using firewalls (t003), documented in a threat report.

Trace data flows between browser, web server, storage, and database in a file upload scenario, illustrating how file data, metadata, and retrieval travel through the system.

Map trust boundaries and zones across the internet, the demilitarized zone, and internal assets to enforce appropriate access controls. Show how authentication gates entry and restricts permissions between zones.

Identify threats in the application by examining assets, data flow, and trust boundaries, flag spoofing, tampering, and repudiation, and explore threat modeling tools to support comprehensive analysis.

Recap the hands-on threat modeling of a web application by drawing data flow diagrams, identifying assets, data flows, and trust boundaries, and documenting threats in a threat report.

Learn how threat modeling tools support decomposition and automatically identify threats from data flow diagrams using stride methodology. Explore mitigations, risk, and hands-on demonstrations with the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool.

Use pen and paper or a whiteboard to map assets, data flows, and trust boundaries and zones, forming a data flow diagram to identify threats and mitigations.

Explore Threat Dragon, OWASP's open source threat modeling tool for web and desktop, supporting Stride, Lyndon, and CIA to generate threats for DFDs.

Explore the Microsoft threat modeling tool, a Windows desktop application that uses stride to automatically generate threats from a drawn DFD of assets and data flows, with analysis views.

Explore four threat modeling tools—IriusRisk, ThreatModeler, Threagile, and AWS Threat Composer—and learn how features like automatic threat generation, Jira integration, and statement-based threat building inform tool selection for your organization.

Review threat modeling tools, including manual and automatic options and customizable Microsoft tools, and their use with ticketing systems to monitor threats and compliance risks in applications.

Dive into the Microsoft threat modeling tool, exploring its features, templates, stencils, models, threat list, threat properties, and threat reports, plus installation and customization for cloud, mobile, and IoT.

Install the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool by downloading the latest version from the provided link, run the installer, accept the terms, and launch the app.

Learn to navigate the Microsoft threat modeling tool’s landing page, use the two entry points—threat model and template—and select templates to build domain-specific threat models.

Open your threat model by switching from design view to analysis view, then see automatically generated threats from the DFT, using stencils, multiple diagrams, and threat properties.

Explore stencils and their element properties within a data flow diagram, adjust defaults for storage and database attributes, and observe how threat lists increase with credentials and encryption choices.

See how the DFT drawn in the design view generates a thread list in the analysis view, and learn to customize thread properties to respond to threats and set priorities.

Explore how to generate full and custom threat reports from the threat modeling tool, track threat statuses, and see how threat model information drives the report content.

Recap installing and using the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool, drawing a DFT with stencils to map asset types to properties, exploring the landing page template, and generating threat reports.

Learn to customize templates, stencils, and threat properties in the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool, creating templates for AWS cloud, IoT, and mobile apps, and adding threat types with custom conditions.

Learn to customize templates by copying or creating from scratch, rename and version them, and set stores credentials by default for AWS stencils like DynamoDB, Aurora, and DocumentDB.

Learn to create custom stencils in a template for threat modeling, including wifi and bluetooth stencils with properties like connection type and authentication, using the Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool.

Learn to create and manage threat categories and threat types, set include and exclude conditions, and customize threat properties with extra attributes.

Learn to customize the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool by adapting templates and stencils. Create new templates and stencils, define a Data Breach threat, and apply includes and excludes conditions.

Summarize threat modeling concepts from what, why, when, and who to how, exploring approaches, methodologies, and hands-on tools like the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool to produce reports.