Threat Modeling: A Rough Diamond or Fool's Gold?

Abstract

Threat modeling is a process to identify security threats and propose effective solutions for mitigating them. Numerous resources emphasize the importance of threat modeling in the secure software development lifecycle, particularly during the design phase. In this paper, we collect and discuss the (scarce) empirical evidence from the literature that provides insights into the adoption and utilization of threat modeling. Based on our observations, we also formulate a number of open challenges related to gaining a better empirical understanding of the use of threat modeling in practice.