Threat Modeling Readiness

This document explains the threat modeling processes regarded as industry best practice and now required as a precondition for audits requested from the SDF Audit Bank.

Background: Completion of the 15-minute YouTube series “World’s Shortest Threat Modeling Course” here.

Background: At a minimum, it will be helpful to have a procedural design or data flow diagram that documents, in sufficient detail, the data flow through the system to be audited.

What is threat modeling?

Threat modeling provides a structured way of thinking critically about the data flows, trust boundaries, and internal processes for software. Effectively, threat modeling provides a guided way to think through the security implications of design decisions and can help uncover previously unidentified or unseen security threats or design issues.

Why is threat modeling important?

Threat modeling provides a framework and space to think critically about the software being designed or developed. By fully taking advantage of the benefits threat modeling provides, security threats and design issues can be identified earlier in the development lifecycle, resulting in cleaner and more secure code being run when users begin interacting with it. By identifying issues earlier in the development process, cost for re-work is reduced, making for more efficient use of resources. Ecosystem developers who have properly addressed insights gleaned from threat modeling will benefit from more in-depth and valuable audit results.