OWASP Ontology Driven Threat Modeling Framework

What is OdTM?

OWASP Ontology-driven Threat Modelling (OdTM) framework is a set of means for implementation of an ontological approach into automatic threat modelling of computer systems.

Description

The OdTM framework enables formalization of security related knowledge (architectural components and associated threats and countermeasures) of different computer system types (architectural domains) in form of domain-specific threat models, or ontologies in the OWL (Web Ontology language) format. That gives a useful way to collect the knowledge by security professionals and share with software architects, developers and users. Also, the framework allows to describe a computer system in term of a domain-specific threat model with a DFD (data flow diagram), and use automatic reasoning procedures to build a threat model (relevant threats and countermeasures) of the system. Such a feature makes it easily automation of the threat modelling process.

Our goals are:

  • to maintain a base threat model (ontology) that enables creation of domain-specific threat models;
  • to create different domain-specific threat models (for Web applications, Cloud computing, Internet of Things etc.);
  • to develop an ontology-driven threat rule engine, and a GUI editor of domain-specific threat models.

Roadmap

Vision: Involve the ontology-driven approach into automatic threat modelling for collecting, sharing and usage of the strict security-related knowledge through creation of domain-specific threat models and development of software tools.

Initial plan:

  • Milestone 1: To implement a threat rule engine (OdTM Server) as a remote JSON API service.
  • Milestone 2: To develop various domain-specific threat models (the cloud computing domain as the first step).
  • Milestone 3: To implement software modules, providing integration of OdTM Server with GUI threat modelling tools.
  • Milestone 4: To implement a GUI editor of domain-specific threat models (OdTM Studio).

Technology: Knowledge engineering, OWL (Web Ontology Language), Java, the OWL API library, the Jackson JSON library.

from OWASP:

third-party:

Getting Involved

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate in the OWASP OdTM project with contributions (github pulls, issues, clons etc.), collaboration, feedback, and promotion.