Measuring Security Investment Benefit for Off the Shelf Software Systems - A Stakeholder Value Driven Approach.
Yue Chen · 2007
This paper presents the Threat Modeling method based on Attacking Path Analysis (T-MAP) which quantifies security threats by calculating the total severity weights of relevant attacking paths for Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) based systems. Compared to existing approaches, T-MAP is sensitive to an organization’s business value priorities and IT environment. It distills the technical details of thousands of relevant software vulnerabilities into management-friendly numbers at a high-level, and systematically establishes the traceability and consistency from management-level organizational value propositions to technical-level security threats and corresponding mitigation strategies. In its initial usage in a large IT organization, T-MAP has demonstrated promising strength in prioritizing and estimating security investment effectiveness, as well as in evaluating the security performance of COTS systems. In the case study, we demonstrate the steps of using T-MAP to analyze the cost-effectiveness of how system patching, user account control and firewall can improve security. In addition, we introduce a software tool that automates the T-MAP.