Automatically Extracting Threats from Extended Data Flow Diagrams

Abstract. Architectural risk analysis is an important aspect of develop-ing software that is free of security flaws. Knowledge on architectural flaws, however, is sparse, in particular in small or medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we propose a practical approach to architectural risk analysis that leverages Microsoft’s threat modeling. Our technique decouples the creation of a system’s architecture from the process of detecting and collecting architectural flaws. This way, our approach allows an software architect to automatically detect vulnerabilities in software architectures by using a security knowledge base. We evaluated our approach with real-world case studies, focusing on logistics applications. The evalua-tion uncovered several flaws with a major impact on the security of the software