A review of the application architecture to develop logical threat components related to the application's components. Key activities include:
- Understand the types of threats based on the nature of the business.
- Identify likely vulnerabilities based on the nature of the application and its architecture.
- Estimate the probability and potential business impact for those vulnerabilities whose impact might lead to an unacceptable business disruption.
- Develop a system security plan that addresses those vulnerabilities where the risk is deemed unacceptable.
- Formal reporting on the process, gap analysis, relevant findings, and mitigation roadmap. Where possible the report will also include: root cause analysis, peer-group benchmarking, good practice benchmarking, executive summaries, and technical summaries.
While the threats to each asset within the Application can be individually developed and mapped, a more efficient approach is to develop a master list of threat types and identify how these can be used to launch an attack on the Application, its components, supporting systems, or the organization itself.
The predominant benefits realized by a Threat Assessment:
- Threat Assessments ensure that the organization is aware of relevant risks and form the basis for defining control requirements for System Security Plans.
- Threat Assessment results help to focus activities based on business requirements and operational reality.
- Threat Assessments allows vulnerabilities discovered during testing phases to be prioritized based on risk to the organization.
Threat Assessments are best used:
- During the early design phases of the development life cycle to ensure that security is "baked in" to the application. This approach reduces the likelihood that security will need to be "bolted on" to the application pre-deployment at greater expense and less efficacy.
- To understand the risk associated with an application and determine which other activities (e.g. automated testing, expert testing, code review, etc.) should be leveraged to achieve sufficient assurance.