{"id":7736,"date":"2022-01-12T12:25:51","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T12:25:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/?p=7736"},"modified":"2022-01-12T12:25:52","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T12:25:52","slug":"stride-threat-modelling-6-steps-to-secure-apps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/stride-threat-modelling-6-steps-to-secure-apps\/","title":{"rendered":"STRIDE Threat Modelling: Six Steps to a Secure Application"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"7736\" class=\"elementor elementor-7736\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-45e0897e elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"45e0897e\" data-element_type=\"section\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-2a13f229\" data-id=\"2a13f229\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-264884f6 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"264884f6\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<style>\/*! elementor - v3.11.5 - 14-03-2023 *\/\n.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-stacked .elementor-drop-cap{background-color:#818a91;color:#fff}.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-framed .elementor-drop-cap{color:#818a91;border:3px solid;background-color:transparent}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap{margin-top:8px}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap-letter{width:1em;height:1em}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap{float:left;text-align:center;line-height:1;font-size:50px}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap-letter{display:inline-block}<\/style>\t\t\t\t<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Today\u2019s cyber attackers are becoming ever more inventive in the way they achieve big bang cyber attacks, using tactics such as <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/us-treasury-cyber-attack-suppliers-in-the-spotlight\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">hacking suppliers<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in order to gain access to their customers, or compromising vulnerabilities inside an application\u2019s code in order to attack an organisation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a result, developers need to be more threat conscious than ever when creating their applications and products. But with so many new and emerging threats, how can they be sure they\u2019ve thought of everything?<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s where a framework such as STRIDE threat modelling can help. STRIDE threat modelling supports developers and organisations to identify cybersecurity threats to their application, prioritise them based on impact and likelihood, and build mitigation into their secure software development lifecycle (<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/secure-software-development-life-cycle-ssdlc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SSDLC<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">).<\/span><\/p><h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is STRIDE threat modelling?<\/span><\/h2><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling is a developer focussed threat modelling method based on six common threats that target software. STRIDE is an acronym for each of the threat categories it deals with: <\/span><b>S<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">poofing, <\/span><b>T<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">ampering, <\/span><b>R<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">epudiation, <\/span><b>I<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">nformation disclosure, <\/span><b>D<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">enial of Service, and <\/span><b>E<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">levation of privilege.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The STRIDE threat model was created in 1999 by security researchers at <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/securityengineering\/sdl\/threatmodeling\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Microsoft<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. While STRIDE threat modelling is useful for organisations on its own, is also forms part of a wider methodology that provides security teams with a practical framework for identifying threats and dealing with them by defining security requirements, creating an application diagram, identifying threats, mitigating threats, and validating that threats have been mitigated.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The six threat groups considered in the STRIDE threat modelling framework focus on different elements of security within an application, encouraging developers to think about the threats that could impact every part of an application or system, and the ways that they can protect against them right from the start of the development process.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The six elements of STRIDE threat modelling are:<\/span><\/p><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spoofing<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A spoofing attack is when attackers disguise their identity to successfully impersonate a trusted source and gain access to important data or information from a user. Spoofing often uses <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/6-social-engineering-tactics-in-action-in-2021\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">social engineering<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to convince users to give information such as usernames and passwords. Once they have the information, attackers will use it to gain access to the application and from there infect the network.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spoofing attacks include cookie replay attacks, session hijacking, and cross site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since spoofing is an attack on user authentication, the best form of prevention is to implement secure user authentication methods, including both secure password requirements and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/secure-passwords-dont-protect-network-security\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">multi-factor authentication<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (MFA).<\/span><\/p><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tampering<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tampering involves the deliberate modification of a system in order to change its behaviour. Attackers will try to compromise applications by tampering target parameters or code in order to modify application data such as user credentials and permissions, or other crucial items in the application.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Tampering attacks such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection damage the integrity of the application. In order to protect against tampering, the application should be <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/secure-software-development-life-cycle-ssdlc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">designed<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to validate user inputs, and encode outputs. Static code analysis should be used to identify vulnerabilities to tampering in the application both during the development stage and once the application is in production.<\/span><\/p><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Repudiation<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A repudiation attack is an attack on the validity and integrity of actions on the application. Repudiation attacks take advantage of a lack of controls which properly track and log user actions, using this lack to manipulate or forge the identification of new, non-authorised actions, delete logs or log the wrong data to log files, and deny actions or receipt of service (for example, committing fraud).<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Developers can build non-repudiation, or the assurance that someone can\u2019t deny the validity of an action, by incorporating digital signatures in the application which provide proof of actions, or by ensuring that there are full, tamper-proof logs in place.<\/span><\/p><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Information disclosure<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Information disclosure is when the application unintentionally reveals information about the application that can be used by attackers to compromise the system.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Information disclosure can come from developer comments that are left in the application, source code that provides parameter information, or error messages that contain too many details, revealing data about users, sensitive commercial or business data, and technical details about the application and its infrastructure.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This information can then be used by attackers to force access to the application gathering information about customers, which can be used in further crime, or to gain privileges which in turn will give access to more sensitive areas of the application.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Developers are at the heart of preventing information disclosure vulnerabilities on the application:<\/span><\/p><ul><li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Error messages, response headers, and background information should be as generic as possible to avoid revealing clues about the application\u2019s behaviour.\u00a0<\/span><\/li><li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Proper access controls and authorisations should be in place to prevent unauthorised access to information.\u00a0<\/span><\/li><li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The application itself should be checked over from a user perspective to validate that developer comments and other information is not revealed in the production environment.<\/span><\/li><\/ul><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Denial of service<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Denial of service (DoS) attacks flood the target with traffic, triggering a crash, and shutting it down to legitimate traffic. DoS attacks typically cost time and money, but do not cause other damage to their victims. The most common form of DoS attack is a buffer overflow attack which simply sends too much traffic to the application. Other attacks exploit vulnerabilities to cause systems to crash.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">DoS attacks can target both the network layer or the application layer. Applications can be protected against DoS attacks by configuring firewalls to block traffic from certain sources such as reserved, loopback, or private IP addresses, or unassigned <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">DCHP<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">DHCP<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> clients, or introducing rate limiting to manage traffic.<\/span><\/p><h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Escalation of privilege<\/span><\/h3><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Privilege escalation attacks exploit vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in the application to gain illicit access to elevated or privileged rights. Privilege escalation attacks may exploit credential and authentication processes, compromise vulnerabilities in code and design, take advantage of misconfigurations, or use malware or social engineering to gain access.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Protection against escalation of privilege should be built into the application at the development stage. This includes managing the identity lifecycle, enforcing the principle of least privilege for all users, hardening systems and applications through configuration changes, removing unnecessary rights and access, closing ports, and more.<\/span><\/p><h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The benefits of STRIDE threat modelling<\/span><\/h2><p><b>Get ahead of vulnerabilities at an early stage<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many of the accepted ways of identifying vulnerabilities (static code analysis, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/penetration-testing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">penetration testing<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/can-bug-bounty-programmes-replace-pen-testing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">bug bounties<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and so on) come into play once all or most of the application has been developed. However, it\u2019s cheaper and easier to fix flaws during the development cycle than it is once the vulnerabilities are in the live product.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling is a development-centric method of assessing the threats that may impact on an application. STRIDE can be used to form a checklist for a <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/secure-software-development-life-cycle-ssdlc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">secure software development lifecycle<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, supporting developers to identify potential weaknesses early on when they are cheaper and easier to mitigate or remediate.<\/span><\/p><p><b>Take a security first approach<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling is built around threats encouraging developers to think about how each of the threats under consideration could attack different parts of the application. Furthermore, it challenges assumptions, making developers and information security teams question their assumptions, and test them for validity and security.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The outcomes of a STRIDE threat modelling exercise can be combined with the DREAD risk assessment model (Damage potential, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected users, Discoverability) to assess the impact of each risk, and prioritise vulnerabilities for remediation.<\/span><\/p><p><b>STRIDE threat modelling can be carried out over and over again<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling is never over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling is a framework that allows for threat modelling exercises at regular intervals to enable security teams to keep on top of the rapidly evolving threat landscape, and ensure that the protections in place are able to withstand both older and newer threats.<\/span><\/p><p><b>STRIDE threat modelling is part of a wider cybersecurity programme<\/b><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Creating secure applications and systems and protecting them requires a multi-faceted <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/security-risk-and-compliance\/cybersecurity-risk-management\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">cybersecurity risk management<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> programme that incorporates <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/infrastructure-security\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">infrastructure protections<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and other activities such as testing the security of applications and systems regularly with <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/penetration-testing\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">penetration tests<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">STRIDE threat modelling provides one of these facets, supporting developers to incorporate <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/application-security\/secure-software-development-life-cycle-ssdlc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">secure development practices<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> when developing applications and systems. STRIDE threat modelling alone will not secure your application, but it will provide a strong foundation from the very start of the process.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stay safe<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today\u2019s cyber attackers are becoming ever more inventive in the way they achieve big bang cyber attacks, using tactics such as hacking suppliers in order to gain access to their customers, or compromising vulnerabilities inside an application\u2019s code in order to attack an organisation.&nbsp; As a result, developers need to be more threat conscious than&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":7748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[63,62],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outofsite.biz\/cynance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}