Saturday, August 20, 2005

Does anyone have good Threat Models?

Ian Grigg asks WYTH? (What's Your Threat Model?), and does a pretty good job of explaining the defacto threat model for the internet, the same threat model used in the design of SSL and TLS. Ian then proceeds to point out the bad assumptions, and the need for a better model.

I can't seem to find a good source for the threat model used in Unix or Windows. I can only assume, which I'd rather not do.

It's entirely possible there was no threat model for Unix, but just a common shared set of assumptions and a subconsious model in the heads of the developers.

I want to show how the nature of threats, and the various fudge factors used when guessing about the outcome of a threat tree have shifted drastically in the past 30 years. Once this is brought out into the open, we can discuss how to mitigate and better design future systems.

So, I'm looking for threat models for Unix, Linux and Windows to use in this analysis. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--Mike--

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