SAMM - Threat Assessment - 2

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Results

 * Granular understanding of likely threats to individual projects
 * Framework for better tradeoff decisions within project teams
 * Ability to prioritize development efforts within a project team based on risk weighting

Add’l Success Metrics

 * >75% of project teams with identified and rated threats
 * >75% of project stakeholders briefed on threat and abuse models of relevant projects within past 6 months

Add’l Costs

 * Project overhead from maintenance of threat models and attacker profiles

Add’l Personnel

 * Security Auditor (1 day/yr)
 * Business Owner (1 day/yr)
 * Managers (1 day/yr)

Related Levels

 * Strategy & Metrics - 2
 * Secure Architecture - 2

A. Build and maintain abuse-case models per project
Further considering the threats to the organization, conduct a more formal analysis to determine potential misuse or abuse of functionality. Typically, this process begins with identification of normal usage scenarios, e.g. use-case diagrams if available.

If a formal abuse-case technique isn’t used, generate a set of abuse-cases for each scenario by starting with a statement of normal usage and brainstorming ways in which the statement might be negated, in whole or in part. The simplest way to get started is to insert the word “no” or “not” into the usage statement in as many ways as possible, typically around nouns and verbs. Each usage scenario should generate several possible abuse-case statements.

Further elaborate the abuse-case statements to include any application-specific concerns based on the business function of the software. The ultimate goal is for the completed set of abuse statements to form a model for usage patterns that should be disallowed by the software. If desired, these abuse cases can be combined with existing threat models.

After initial creation, abuse-case models should be updated for active projects during the design phase. For existing projects, new requirements should be analyzed for potential abuse, and existing projects should opportunistically build abuse-cases for established functionality where practical.

B. Adopt a weighting system for measurement of threats
Based on the established attacker profiles, identify a rating system to allow relative comparison between the threats. Initially, this can be a simple high-medium-low rating based upon business risk, but any scale can be used provided that there are no more than 5 categories.

After identification of a rating system, build evaluation criteria that allow each threat to be assigned a rating. In order to do this properly, additional factors about each threat must be considered beyond motivation. Important factors include capital and human resources, inherent access privilege, technical ability, relevant goals on the threat model(s), likelihood of successful attack, etc.

After assigning each threat to a rating, use this information to prioritize risk mitigation activities within the development life-cycle. Once built for a project team, it should be updated during design of new features or refactoring efforts.