SPARTA: Security & Privacy Architecture Through Risk-Driven Threat Assessment

The development of secure and privacy-preserving software systems entails the continuous consideration of the security and privacy aspects of the system under development. While contemporary software development practices do support such a continuous approach towards software development, existing threat modeling activities are commonly executed as single-shot efforts leading to a single, historic, and quickly obsolete view on the security and privacy of the system. This disconnect leads to undetected new issues and wasted efforts on already resolved problems, effectively accruing technical debt. The presented SPARTA prototype facilitates the consideration of security and privacy by providing support for: (i) capturing security and privacy design decisions in a DFD-based architectural abstraction, (ii) continuous threat elicitation on this knowledge-enriched abstraction, and (iii) risk analysis of the elicited threats for prioritizing security and privacy efforts. By capturing and continuously assessing the impact of security and privacy design decisions on the elicited threats, the progress towards securing the system can be assessed and alternatives can be compared, taking into account past and present design decisions.