Threat Modeling: Designing for Security

Chapter 8Defensive Tactics and Technologies

So far you've learned to model your software using diagrams and learned to find threats using STRIDE, attack trees, and attack libraries. The next step in the threat modeling process is to address every threat you've found.

When it works, the fastest and easiest way to address threats is through technology-level implementations of defensive patterns or features. This chapter covers the standard tactics and technologies that you will use to mitigate threats. These are often operating system or program features that you can configure, activate, apply or otherwise rapidly engage to defend against one or more threats. Sometimes, they involve additional code that is widely available and designed to quickly plug in. (For example, tunneling connections over SSH to add security is widely supported, and some unix packages even have options to make that easier.)

Because you likely found your threats via STRIDE, the bulk of this chapter is organized according to STRIDE. The main part of the chapter addresses STRIDE and privacy threats, because most pattern collections already include information about how to address the threats.

Tactics and Technologies for Mitigating Threats

The mitigation tactics and technologies in this chapter are organized by STRIDE because that's most likely how you found them. This section is therefore organized by ways to mitigate each of the STRIDE threats, each of which includes a brief recap of the threat, tactics ...