Analyzing Threat Modeling Approaches

Assessing a system’s security and vulnerabilities is becoming more important than ever, especially in critical infrastructures. To do this in an effective and structured manner, a good threat model is paramount. There exists a great number of methodologies to choose from, up to the point where it is very difficult to select an appropriate solution for a specific use case. To facilitate the comparison of threat modeling methodologies in terms of their capabilities, we examine existing approaches and derive a metamodel. Subsequently, it can be used to simplify the analysis process of threat modeling contributions and frameworks, and help users in the selection. We demonstrate this by applying the metamodel to several papers in the critical infrastructure domain.