Ctam: A Tool for Continuous Threat Analysis and Management

Security and privacy threat modeling approaches are commonly applied to identify and address design-level security and privacy concerns in the early stages of software development. Identifying and mitigating these threats should remain a continuous concern during the development lifecycle, as single-shot analyses become quickly outdated with contemporary agile development practices. Despite expert recommendations, the support for continuously applying these types of approaches throughout the development lifecycle is limited. In this article, we present an integrated threat analysis toolchain for automated, continuous threat elicitation, assessment, and mitigation as part of continuous integration pipelines in the GitLab DevOps platform. Automating the threat analysis enables continuous attention to security and privacy threats during the development and supports monitoring and managing the progress in mitigating security and privacy threats over time. Additionally, the integration of threat analysis in a continuous integration pipeline enables more advanced and fine-grained analyses such as assessing the impact of proposed changes in feature branches and the analysis of merge/pull requests for their impact on the threat model. We evaluate the approach and its prototype on a concrete real-world application to assess the threat analysis of multiple application versions over time as changes are made and new features introduced. We conclude with an in-depth discussion on the use of threat modeling in continuous integration contexts.