Gartner Research

5 Frequently Asked Questions About Threat Modeling

Published: 11 April 2022

Summary

As security and risk management development teams create security approaches, threat modeling should be viewed as an effective, long-term improvement tool. However, we regularly receive questions, and confront misunderstandings, about TM best practices and benefits, so here, we address five.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Threat modeling is critical to many security-by-design programs, because it helps security and development teams enumerate likely threat vectors and establish effective mitigations.

  • TM is a time-intensive exercise, especially when creating new models from scratch.

  • Differential threat models, which involve changing existing TM practices, based on design or mitigation changes, are faster, less-intensive ways to gain scale; however, they require work at the start.

  • All developers need access to the tools and knowledge base for TM to be effective, although only a subset will be modeling new architectures.

  • Although accurate TM can be performed with a whiteboard and marker, it’s a lot

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