Table 3: STRIDE Threat Categories and Security Viola-
tions.
Type of Threat What Was Violated
Spoofing Authentication
Tampering Integrity
Repudiation Non-repudiation
Information Disclosure Confidentiality
Denial of Service (DoS) Availability
Elevation of privilege Authorization
Spoofing. Identity theft. Here, an attacker can steal
the identity of a legitimate user to gain unauthorized
access to the data cooperative system (various mali-
cious tactics may be used). Content Spoofing. The
adversary maliciously modifies data, which are sent
between two members of the cooperatives. Device
Spoofing. An adversary via eavesdropping intercepts
a device or IP information of legitimate users in or-
der to carry out a replay attack. Session Spoofing.
Here, the adversary steals login credentials from le-
gitimate users for future use. Typically, the adversary
deployed the Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) or passive
eavesdropping attack.
Tampering. Data tampering. In a data coop, the
pooled data is a primary target for an attack. Like-
wise, the algorithms and software code—that it uses
to manipulate the data—may be altered by an adver-
sary. Timestamp tampering. The time at which an
event occurred may be a crucial component of a data
coop, such as, for instance, in a neighborhood-watch
data coop (Salau et al., 2021). An attacker can manip-
ulate timestamps, e.g., in order to make it appear that
an event occurred at a different time. Log files tam-
pering. Log files help to keep track of events happen-
ing behind the scene (Forte, 2009). An adversary can
manipulate log file to cover up some other malicious
activities it carried out. Storage tampering. Here, an
attacker targets the data store intending to modify the
data stored in it.
Repudiation. Content repudiation. In this form of
attack, a malicious member in a data cooperative can
deny sending, receiving, or manipulating some data.
This can be backed up with log file tampering. Ac-
tivity hiding. This is a situation where an adversary,
after gaining access to the target system and carrying
out an attack, also covers their track by carrying out
passive attacks, e.g., in a hope to overfill the log files
and hence to hide their malicious activities.
Information Disclosure User Information and Data
disclosure/breaches. This covers an unauthorized ac-
cess to sensitive personal data, such as users’ health
information, credentials, credit card details and so on
which requires protection by laws such as GDPR. Ap-
plication Error Display. When applications encounter
an error and display an error message to the user, such
the message may reveal sensitive information to an at-
tacker. Device Information Disclosure. An intruder
may intercept a communication between legitimate
users and may discover device information such as its
type, IP address, and/or location, which may used to
coordinate future attacks.
Denial of Service DoS. Here, an adversary makes the
system inaccessible or unusable to legitimate users.
An example is making the pooled data unavailable ei-
ther through packet flooding or by exploiting vulnera-
bilities that can lead the system to crash. DDoS. This
can be seen as multiple simultaneous DoS attacks on
a system. For example, multiple sources can launch
such the attack on the data processing algorithms, for
instance, overloading the system with “computation-
ally expensive” requests.
Elevation of Privilege. Unauthorized Privilege to
Restricted Data. An internal adversary, for instance,
may be able to access data above its access level
through malicious tactics such as phishing, brute
force, or identity theft. Abuse of privileges. A legit-
imate user with admin privileges may attack the sys-
tem by granting elevated privileges to unauthorized
users.
4.2 Mitigation Strategies
In this section, we discuss various mitigation strate-
gies and countermeasures to the threats and vulnera-
bilities identified in the previous section. Again, we
use the STRIDE modeling approach in order to match
the mitigation strategies to the vulnerabilities men-
tioned in Sec. 4.1.
Spoofing. Let us first discuss the countermeasures
against spoofing. Network Monitoring. The network
and communication channels must be well monitored
for atypical activities using specialized network mon-
itoring security tools. Authentication. Authentication
systems must be robust. Connections between devices
should be authenticated using secure systems such
as IPSec, domain authentication, and others. More-
over, the members of the coop must adhere strictly to
strong password policies. Packet Filtering. The coop
should deploy packet filtering with deep packet in-
spection (DPI) techniques in order to detect anomalies
such as outgoing traffic with IP address not consistent
with that of the coop’s network. Encryption. Data
should be encrypted both at rest and in transit. Secure
network protocols, such as Transport Layer Security
(TLS), IPSec, and SSH, help to prevent spoofing at-
tacks.
Tampering. Cryptographic data integrity mecha-
nisms. Hash-based data integrity schemes such as
HMAC can be used to ensure authenticity of the data
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