When we speak of pasta, we typically mean wheat-based foods, that the Italians were able to transform into a popular dish across the globe. There’s a different pasta on the menu that’s called PASTA threat modeling. This pasta is a risk-focused and offensive-minded threat modeling approach that analyzes your entire technological and business landscape in order to establish the top priorities for risk reduction.

Here we will take a brief review of how PASTA threat modeling functions and how it could help your business.

What exactly is PASTA threat modeling?

Threat modelling is a method that analyzes, identifies and reduces potential risks for your business. Threat modelling is an proactive method to evaluate the threat your company is facing by providing insight and assessments of the risks and mitigation strategies.

PASTA can be described as an acronym for the Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis. PASTA threat modeling combines an attacker’s perspective of the business along with impact and risk analysis to provide a complete view of threats to applications and products and the vulnerability of these products and applications to attacks and aiding in making decisions regarding the risk and priority of fixing.

PASTA threat modeling is a seven-stage system for assessing your total security posture. Each stage builds upon the work completed prior to the stage, and stage seven is presented with a prioritized list of actions to correct your security weaknesses. Seven stages will be listed below.

Seven stages in PASTA threat modeling

1. Set out your business goals

Make sure you focus on the most important aspects for your company. Know the goals of every application or product. The goals may be driven by internal processes or affected by clients, partners and regulatory structures. They could be based on the requirement for a durable product that operates efficiently and effectively, safeguarding customers and assets, or avoiding risks to reputation.

Stage 2 Stage 2: Define the technical scope of the components and assets

Learn about the attack surface and sketch out the threat you are defending. Each business component should be identified the way they are set up and what dependencies they have on other internal applications or on the places where third party software are utilized. As thorough as you can to identify which could compromise the application, allowing an attack to occur.

Stage 3 Step 3: Application factoring, and identify the application’s controls

The relationships between the components. Determine the roles of users and rights for assets such as hardware, data, services and software. Recognize what implicit trust models exist that could be vulnerable to attack and also the application controls to protect high-risk internet transactions that may become attacks targets.

Stage 4 Analysis of threats using threat intelligence

Find credible threats to your business and products and then build an inventory of threats. Use intelligence to identify the most recent threats that affect your business or products and analyze application logs to comprehend the actions that the system is recording as well as attacks that your existing security measures have stopped.

Stage 5: Detection of vulnerability

Determine which weaknesses could be broken when faced with threat. This stage builds upon stage 2 that identified the attack surface and looks for weaknesses in design, flaws in design, and weaknesses in the system’s codebase, configuration, or the architecture.

For a PASTA example visit threat-modeling.com.

Stage 6: Analyze and model attacks
This is known as the stage of attack. The objective is to mimic the attacks that be exploited to exploit weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and show that the alleged risks to software actually pose risky. The PASTA threat modeling methodology suggests making attack trees, which maps threats, attacks and weaknesses, in order to build an outline of how applications could be hacked. After this process, you’ll have an inventory of attack ways to exploit vulnerabilities, which includes attack vectors.

Stage 7: Impact and risk analysis and design of countermeasures

This stage is based on the questions in earlier phases, like what is important to the organization (stage 1) What are we doing on (stage 2) and how they all collaborate (stage 3) and what do my threat intelligence say about our security risks (stage 4) in order to develop countermeasures

which are relevant to your company or product and also the real threats that you are facing.

The advantages of PASTA threat modeling

There are numerous benefits when you take a comprehensive view of a company’s security posture. Some of the advantages of PASTA threat modeling are:

Make security the central focus of all business. PASTA threat modelling provides an opportunity for all individuals from the entire organization to discover how their priorities are affected by cybersecurity risks, and how their objectives influence the security decisions that an organisation takes.

Find out all the risks an organization could confront. This includes the possibility of these threats turning into attacks and the objectives that threat can impact. Your security team will then prioritize threats in order to reduce them the risk, and ensure that attention and resources are effectively distributed.

Understanding the changing cyber-security landscape. PASTA threat modelling isn’t an in-depth, static assessment that is only performed once. The procedure (at stage four) is an understanding of actual threats that your organization could be exposed to. Security threats to your organization are always evolving and PASTA threat modeling encourages you to invest time in the study of these threats rather than using outdated information or intelligence.

Informed decision making. PASTA threat modeling for new products allows you to assess whether your existing protections are suitable for your new tool. It can also help you make the decision on whether to use the latest tool or product from a manufacturer.

Integrating PASTA threat modelling into your security plan

The primary goal of PASTA threat modeling is to provide your company with some information about the most important issues to address security weaknesses in a way that best meets your security and business requirements.

PASTA threat modeling does not work in isolation. A lot of your current cybersecurity initiatives, from security checks that help you to assess the vulnerability of your apps (which is then incorporated into the stages 5 , 6 and 7 in PASTA) and the efforts you are doing to ensure that you are in compliance with the regulatory requirements, will feed into your threat modeling.

What PASTA threat modeling does is to bring all your cybersecurity into an attack-oriented perspective to create the highest level of cybersecurity planning for your business. This is similar to the way a pasta dish made with a robust sauce can make for dinner.