Threat Modeling

To protect your applications from hackers and intruders you have to understand the threats to your applications

Threat model has three distinct

1. Description of the security issues designer cares about.
2. Description of a set of security aspects.
3. Determining threats

Before you start the threat modeling you should understand the following basic terminology

1. Asset : A resource of value such as a data in the data base or a file system .
2. Threat: A potential occurrence
3. Vulnerability : A weakness in some aspect ,vulnerability may exist at the network ,host, application levels
4. Attack: An Action taken by some one following through the threat or vulnerability.
5. Countermeasure : A safeguard that addresses a threat and mitigates the risk.

Threat Modelling Process:

1. Identify the assets : Identify the valuable assets that your system can protect.
2. Create an Architecture Overview: Use simple diagrams and tables to document the architecture of the application.
3. Decompose the Application: Decompose the architecture of the application including the underlying network and host infrastructure.
4. Identify the threats: Identify the threat that could affect the application.
5. Document the threats: Document the threats using common threat template.
6. Rate the threats : Rate the threats and prioritize the most significant threat first.

Threat model has become an integral part of Microsoft's SDL (Security Development Life Cycle). For more details about threat modeling please visit :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/aa570411.aspx.

Threat Modeling Tool :

The threat modeling tool allows the user to create a threat model documents for application.

For more details for download please visit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=62830f95-0e61-4f87-88a6-e7c663444ac1&displaylang=en