Cumulus is the easy way to bring security into cloud and devOps teams. As a variant of the card game Elevation of Privilege it follows the idea to threat model a system via gamification. This lightweight and low-barrier approach helps you find threats to your devOps or cloud project and teaches the developers a security oriented mindset. Find the latest release here.
The idea of threat modeling via serious games goes back to the card game Elevation of Privilege by Adam Shostack. The basic idea is to bring the developers on a table and get them start discussing the security of their system. For this, a card game serves as a guide through a catalogue of threats. It is designed to be low-barrier and naturally embeddable within agile development processes.
While the original game approaches security in general and another variant, Cornucopia by the OWASP Foundation, targets (web) application security in particular, we had the feeling that the specific needs of devOps team working in cloud environments have been missing. Cumulus seeks to fill this gap and provides a custom card deck with threats to cloud systems.
Threats are classified into the categories (which are also the suits in this game):
Access & Secrets: Threats related to IAM and secrets management
Delivery: Build and ship software, and its supply chain
Recovery: Backup and restore
Monitoring: Logs, alerts and traceability
Resources: Threats on resources and their configuration
This game does explicitly not try to replace Elevation of Privilege or Cornucopia. It should rather be seen as part of a triplet of threat modeling card decks, reflecting different aspects of modern software development projects.
Cumulus was started at and it heavily supported by TNG Technology Consulting.
The original and wonderful idea of conducting threat modeling via serious games goes back to Adam Shostack, working for Microsoft at that time. He invented the game Elevation of Privilege which is the blue print for Cumulus.
Another great game following Elevation of Privilege’s approach to threat modeling is Cornucopia developed at the OWASP Foundation.
Both card games are great tools to help development teams increase the security of the system they are building. However, we felt the need for a threat modeling card game targeting devOps/cloud projects in particular. Out of this idea, Cumulus arose.
The card deck follows semantic versioning. Version changes mean:
patch version: Non-semantic changes: layout, typos, minor re-wordings, …
minor version: Semantic changes: rephrasings, additional cards…
major version: Substantial semantic changes: new categories, …
The card game (including the threat formulations and the released PDF) files are distributed under CC-BY-4.0. When distributing this game, mentioning TNG Technology Consulting is highly appreciated.
Project Resources
Project Information
Slack