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8 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented a technique that aims at au-
tomating thee process of threat modeling, risk anal-
ysis and security policy definition. The proposed
approach, thought to be easily adopted in security-
by-design development methodologies, enables non-
security experts to automate many of the typical steps
performed by security experts. It is worth noticing
that our goal is not to substitute the experts, but en-
abling their (costly) involvement only when strictly
necessary, in order to validate and eventually enrich
the policies, and during the development in order to
verify the correctness of the automated decisions.
The proposed approach require a very simplified
model of the application, similar to state of art tools,
like the Microsoft Threat modeling tool, and the reply
to few very simple questions, that are needed to make
the risk evaluation. The proposed technique was val-
idated comparing its result with existing tools (like
the Microsoft one) and relying on standard and exist-
ing methodologies for the more subjective phases of
the procedure. The comparison with the MS threat
modeling tool, as already outlined in section 5, out-
lined that we identified all the threats suggested by
the competitor, sometime suggesting a more general
threat respect to the one proposed by the tool. At best
of author’s knowledge, no other tool and technique is
able to support in a coherent and homogeneous way
threat agents identification, threat modeling, risk anal-
ysis and countermeasures identification without any
user interaction of not few initial questions and the
starting model we require. In future works we aims
at studying a technique to validate risk analysis tech-
niques like the one proposed, adopting threat intel-
ligence data-sets, in order to both, offer additional
grants on our results and improve the quality of our
risk level evaluations.
Moreover we aims at automating, as much as possi-
ble, the process of enrichment of the threat catalogue,
collecting data from open data sets and enriching the
risk factor evaluation through dedicated analysis and
testing procedures.
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