One cannot possibly envision all potential cyberthreats, but most of the a­ttacks follow a known pattern and can be identified. Threat identification is an iterative procedure that starts from the system requirement phase and continues until the system’s end of life. The system designers keep looking for the threats and mitigation strategy, which gets converted to security requirements or additional security goals along with the traditional security stack. The basic idea is to think like an a­ttacker, look for possible a­ttack vectors and, accordingly, define security goals for the system.

This is where threat modeling emerges as an essential process to understand the system’s interaction with external entities and identify possible threats and att­acks. Now, to mitigate the identified att­acks, the system designer should work in a proactive mode and devise a strategy to override them. They need to think like an a­ttacker and identify att­ack goals and techniques that could be used to compromise the system. This way, they will be able to fix those security loopholes even before they can be exploited.

To learn how threat modeling can be a resourceful way to tackle cyberattacks, download our whitepaper.