Secure by design: Value-driven threat modeling

Avi Douglen (Bounce Security)

11:00–11:45 Wednesday, 6 November 2019

Location: Hall A2

Security

Average rating:

(3.56, 9 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

Architects, senior developers, and technical product managers

Level

Intermediate

Description

Threat modeling is a great method to identify potential security weaknesses and enables architects and developers to efficiently prioritize their security investment, thus mitigating and preventing those vulnerabilities that would most likely cause the most damage. Unfortunately, though threat modeling provides a far greater return than most any other security technique in a development process, it’s apparently “common knowledge” that threat modeling is supposed to be heavily resource intensive, requires a full team of expensive security professionals, takes up far too much developer time, and doesn’t scale at all.

The common knowledge is wrong. In fact, using a lightweight, value-driven approach, skilled development teams can very efficiently ensure that the features they build can protect themselves, the application, and the business value that the features are intended to generate. Value-driven threat modeling offers an alternative to top-heavy, big-model-up-front threat modeling in favor of agility, speed, and integration with the existing development cycle to not just to minimize risk but to lower security costs.

Avi Douglen walks you through value-driven threat modeling with a quick overview of its purpose and the benefits of using it early in the development process and shows you how to incorporate it into your existing agile methodologies. Avi outlines some of the drawbacks and constraints of these approaches, especially from the perspective of the development team to explore how this clashes with the typical workflow. You’ll learn how developers can efficiently threat model their application by integrating it into standard workflows to improve development. Avi runs through a threat modeling process for a sample feature and highlights the differences from classic threat modeling. And of course, you’ll see how security can participate productively in the agile development process, leveraging developers’ own habits to their benefit. He provides several techniques or shortcuts to facilitate adoption by R&D as well as constraints and limitations.

Prerequisite knowledge

Familiarity with modern development practices and agile methodology
A basic understanding security concepts (useful but not required)

What you'll learn

Learn what threat modeling is and why you need it
Discover how to build a threat model for an application
Identify a strategy to integrate a threat modeling process in you own agile development workflow

Avi Douglen

Bounce Security

Avi Douglen is the founder and CEO at Bounce Security, a boutique consultancy specializing in software security, where he spends a lot of time with development teams of all sizes. He helps them integrate security methodologies and products into their development processes, and often provides training on secure coding and other security topics. Avi is a security architect and developer with decades of experience building complex systems and implementing security requirements. He’s been designing, developing, and testing secure applications for over 20 years and is obsessed with maximizing value output from security efforts. His research interests include efficient security engineering, usable security, and scaling enterprise security systems. He’s a frequent trainer and speaker at industry conferences, such as OWASP, RSA, BSides, and Infosec, as well as developer conferences such as DevSecCon, PyCon, and devopsdays. He’s trained hundreds of developers on security, including secure coding, security architecture, threat modeling, and more. Avi also cofounded the OWASP Threat Modeling project and is one of the project leaders. He leads the OWASP Israel chapter and created the successful AppSec Israel security conference. He volunteers as a high school tech teacher and mentor and is a community moderator on https://Security.StackExchange.com.