Protection Poker James Walden Northern Kentucky University

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering What is Protection Poker?  Collaborative, informal risk analysis technique based on planning poker.  Evaluate requirements  Ease of attack.  Impact of attack.  Risk = Ease * Impact

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Software Security Risk Assessment via Protection Poker

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Players 1.Programmers 2.Testers 3.Customer representatives 4.Security team representative 5.Specialists (UI, DB, etc.)

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Procedure 1.Calibrate value of system assets. 2.Calibrate ease of attack for requirements. 3.Compute security risk (value, ease) for each requirement. 4.Security risk ranking and discussion.

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Calibrate Value of Assets 1.Examine assets listed in Table 1. 2.Identify least valuable asset in Table 1.  Discuss.  Assign a value of 1 in Table 1 to asset. 3.Identify most valuable asset in Table 1.  Use cards to achieve consensus about how much more valuable asset is.  Assign consensus value in Table 1 to asset.

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Calibrate Ease of Attack 1.Identify easiest requirement to attack.  Find one that modify data, allow reads of sensitive data, have weak auth, etc.  Use cards to find consensus value. 2.Identify hardest requirement to attack.  Find one that doesn’t modify data, allow reads of sensitive data, has strong auth, etc.  Use cards to find consensus value. 3.Record ease points in Table 3.

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Compute Security Risk For each requirement 1.Identify relevant assets. 2.If values have already been assigned, document assets with values in Table 2. 3.If values have not been assigned, use cards to achieve consensus value. Record value in Tables 1 and 2. 4.Record max value in Table 2. For each requirement 1.Use cards to achieve consensus on ease of attack. Record value in Table 3. 2.Compute risk by multiplying value by ease. Record the value for risk in Table 3.

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Security Risk Ranking 1.Rank requirements by risk from 1 to 4. 2.Place value in security risk ranking Table 3. 3.If any rankings are a surprise, discuss and iterate with cards if necessary.

CSC 666: Secure Software Engineering Why does it work? 1.Brings together multiple expert opinions with different perspectives on project. 2.Ratings focus on attack resistance analysis. 3.Discussions enable ambiguity analysis.

References 1.Laurie Williams, Michael Gegick and Andy Meneely. Protection Poker: Structuring Software Security Risk Assessment and Knowledge Transfer. Engineering Secure Software and Systems Laurie Williams. Protection Poker Tutorial. ecurity/ProtectionPoker/, ecurity/ProtectionPoker/