Threat Modeling as a DevSecOps Practice

Software engineers are always under pressure to build more software, faster. At the same time, there is increasing regulatory and market pressure for secure software that meets users’ and regulators’ requirements for data privacy. This dynamic often puts software engineers at odds with application security or product security teams.

In fact, 81% of developer teams at large enterprises have launched applications that feature insecure code, according to one researcher, with half doing this on a regular basis. The firm argued that developers and security architects need a better relationship, and I couldn’t agree more.

These technical teams are working towards the same goal, so it’s in everyone’s interests—particularly senior leadership—to create a more cohesive working environment by breaking down barriers between teams. If the security of a system is designed and enforced by an external security team—disconnected from the rest of the engineering team—then this only reinforces security as a separate silo. But companies can ease tensions by embedding the responsibility for security in the engineering teams themselves: This is the thinking behind DevSecOps. Thinking about security starts when engineers think about solving the problem: At design time.

While the shift left movement was born two decades ago with the goal of ensuring product testing happened early in the development stage, I believe we need to start left to make real change. In adopting this culture, security and privacy will be less of a bolt-on afterthought and a built-in fixture within the development process, ensuring that engineers and security teams alike are aligned and have visibility of each other’s objectives.

By reimagining the build, test, fix, build, test, fix cycle through building an architecturally secure design in real-time, technical teams can detect software vulnerabilities sooner rather than later, which means more efficient product deployment. This is where the process of threat modeling as a business tool can be of great benefit.

Historically, threat modeling was a static, slow and manual process conducted on whiteboards, as part of a workshop led by a third-party security expert who lacked institutional knowledge of the inner workings of the company. However, this has evolved dramatically into an easily implemented, automated security practice that can be baked into the development and security cycle from the outset, empowering organizations to start left.

Through automated threat modeling, the security workload burden is relieved for both security architects and engineers. Companies are, in turn, better positioned to keep pace with the cadence of ongoing software rollouts, as an automated platform suggests security improvements as an application evolves. The launch phase bottleneck that’s typically created during the testing stage is therefore removed, as security requirements are identified prior to development—which means that risk is managed before a line of code is even written. Based on this, it should quickly become apparent what a time- and cost-saving exercise threat modeling is.

No developer or security specialist wants a flawed product to hit the market, so it makes good business sense to adopt a new approach that will lead to better outcomes. Enterprises that introduce threat modeling as part of their development and cybersecurity processes will be on course to embed a true DevSecOps system within the company, transforming the relationship between these two departments.

In my experience, culture and growth are the key factors for enterprises that decide to adjust their cybersecurity diet to include automated threat modeling. Convincing the app dev teams to invest time into the process is, by far, the most significant cultural hurdle to overcome, because they need to witness the benefits—and up until this point they’re disconnected from the AppSec process.

Once equipped with the tools and knowledge, delivering secure design will be second nature to developers and a new collaborative culture will be created. In essence, the more teams are given oversight of and accountability for software design flaws, the easier it is to recognize how vital these preliminary checks are.

Likewise, there comes a stage of business growth when the ‘security first’ and ‘start left’ mindsets are essential to keep enterprise project management on track—and this ties into the culture. As the rate of scale within a company begins to increase and the pace of software deployment must quicken in line with customer demand and market competitiveness, discovering flaws at the end of the design process just isn’t an option.

With developers and security teams responsible for vast amounts of code, product resilience on delivery is crucial and ensuring a robust DevSecOps culture is the route to success.