threat modeling Archives - Omer Levi Hevroni

I’m a huge fun of threat modeling. It’s a very powerful tool, that can find a lot of security issues. If you’re not familiar with it, check out my earlier post on the subject. For the past few years, I was struggling with one simple question: when should we conduct threat modeling? After all, threat modeling has a price – it takes time to conduct it, and usually involve a few peoples. We can’t conduct a full threat model for every feature – we need to find a way to identify the “interesting” features that require a threat model.

One very interesting solution to this hard problem was proposed by Izar Tarandach in this talk. In short, he proposes to tag features as “threat model worthy”, and once in a while go over all the features with this tag and review them. This is a really interesting approach, and I highly recommend you to watch the entire talk. However, from my experience, it’s not a silver bullet for this problem, and I want to propose an alternative approach.

Continue reading “Do we really need threat modeling?” →

Infrastructure-as-code (and GitOps) extend the use of source control (git) and code (well, manifest files) into a new field. This changed radically how we create infrastructure in the cloud, by making the process more robust and less error prone, and also easier for developers. Can we do the same for threat modeling? How can threat-modeling-as-code change and improve the way we do threat modeling today?

Let’s start with a really short introduction to threat modeling. Threat modeling is a practice that help us take a system design and look for possible security issues, by asking these 4 questions:

What are we building?
What can go wrong?
What are we doing about it?
Are we doing a good job?

Conduction a threat model helps to find issues sooner – and in most cases, detect issues that are hard to find using other practices. This is why conducting a threat model is a critical part in building a secre software. If you’re not familiar with this practice, I’m highly recommending this post by Adam Shostack, one of the authorities in the field. OWASP Threat Modeling project (and channel) is also an excellent learning resource.

Continue reading “Threat Modeling as Code” →