- Common Themes among Security Risk Analysis Approaches
- Traditional Risk Analysis Terminology
- Knowledge Requirement
- The Necessity of a Forest-Level View
- A Traditional Example of a Risk Calculation
- Limitations of Traditional Approaches
- Modern Risk Analysis
- Touchpoint Process: Architectural Risk Analysis
- Getting Started with Risk Analysis
- Architectural Risk Analysis Is a Necessity
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Getting Started with Risk Analysis
This whole risk analysis thing seems a bit hard; but risk analysis does not really have to be hard. Sometimes when faced with a seemingly large task like this, it’s difficult to get the ball rolling. To counter that problem, Appendix C presents a simple exercise in armchair risk analysis. The idea is to apply some of the ideas you have learned in this chapter to complete a risk analysis exercise on a pretend system (riddled with security flaws). I hope you find the exercise interesting and fun. [13]
Start with something really simple, like the STRIDE model [Howard and LeBlanc 2003]. Develop a simple checklist of attacks and march down the list, thinking about various attack categories (and the related flaws that spawn them) as you go. Checklists are not a complete disaster (as the existence of the attack resistance subprocess shows). In fact, in the hands of an expert, checklists (like the 48 attack patterns in Exploiting Software [Hoglund and McGraw 2004]) can be very powerful tools. One problem with checklists is that you are not very likely to find a new, as-yet-to-be-discovered attack if you stick only to the checklist. [14] Another problem is that in the hands of an inexperienced newbie, a checklist is not a very powerful tool. Then again, newbies should not be tasked with architectural risk analysis.