Value Driven Security Threat Modeling Based on Attack Path Analysis

This paper presents a quantitative threat modeling method, the threat modeling method based on attack path analysis (T-MAP), which quantifies security threats by calculating the total severity weights of relevant attack paths for commercial off the shelf (COTS) 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. T-MAP can help system designers evaluate the security performance of COTS systems and analyze the effectiveness of security practices. In the case study, we demonstrate the steps of using T-MAP to analyze the cost-effectiveness of how system patching and upgrades can improve security. In addition, we introduce a software tool that automates the T-MAP