Software security design assessment
Hacked or tampered versions of your applications can greatly affect your company's reputation and bottom line.
Cloakware's Security Design Assessment service provides customers with an expert assessment and review of their software's security, and recommendations to mitigate against any potential threats. Whether you are currently in the design development phase of a new software product, already have a current product in the marketplace, or are thinking about creating something new, we have a wide range of services that can help you achieve your security objectives.
Methodology
Cloakware's Security Design Assessment methodology identifies real-world threats based on existing designs and relevant security requirements and analyzes the ways in which any of these theoretical threats can be realized as successful attacks. This could be any software security domain, not necessarily related to media or DRM. A successful attack is one which succeeds in violating the security requirements, for instance obtaining access to sensitive protected content, keys, algorithms, licenses, libraries, etc. Attack methods can be grouped into threat classes which are different types of approaches an attacker might choose, either as an end attack in itself (such as stealing content) or as an intermediate step towards such an attack (such as defeating anti-cloning logic). Every successful attack ultimately compromises a specific “asset”, such as a cryptographic key. See table below for examples of threat classes.
The goal of a software security assessment is to provide our clients with a full report including a detailed analysis in a matrix format that includes:
- Target assets
- Threats
- Recommended protection methods
The assessment and resulting report covers the following:
Capturing the salient details of the system architecture
The report pays special attention to architecture details of security interest and the architectural assumptions which form the basis of the Security Design Assessment.
Identification and characterization of the relevant security requirements
The report identifies the Security Requirements within the system architecture. These are discerned by examining the functional and security properties of the system as well as the relevant business drivers. These requirements are characterized in terms of the information assets of security interest, and:
- the criticality of these assets;
- the security objectives for these assets; and
- the security approaches appropriate for these asset.
If warranted, the Cloakware report will also:
- identify points of potential vulnerability where an asset is exposed for breach;
- characterize the degree of exposure, and
- characterize the susceptibility of these vulnerabilities to classes of threats.
Evaluation of the current security design against the security requirements.
The report identifies the security controls (i.e. countermeasures) that are planned for or currently in the system architecture. The designed security controls are systematically assessed against the identified security requirements. The report identifies where the current security design satisfies or fails to satisfy the security requirements.
Recommendation of additional countermeasures (if necessary) to satisfy the security requirements.
If security gaps are identified, the report will include a prioritized set of recommendations for meeting the security requirements of the system.
Measure the current, planned and recommended countermeasures relative to the security requirements
The report states security assurance target levels for each asset identified in the security requirement. A three-valued scale is used to approximate, based on the detailed analysis elsewhere in the report, the appropriate level of security for each asset/requirement. The same scale is used to assess the level of security achieved in:
- the current security architecture;
- the planned security architecture; and
- the recommended security architecture.
This results in a dashboard for at-a-glance tracking of the architectural security.
