Modeling Information Security Threats for Smart Grid Applications by Using Software Engineering and Risk Management

This paper introduces a novel information security threat modeling (ISTM) method on the strength of software engineering and risk management, named ISERM. Compared to the existed ISTM approaches, the ISERM adds the concept of determining functional components, referring to threat types, leveraging risk breakdown structure, and prioritizing key threats to form a new ISTM process. In the proposed ISERM approach, the software engineering approaches including product flow diagram, use case diagram, and data flow diagram are used; besides, two proposed tables STRIDE+p and threat breakdown structure (TBS) are applied to help the ISTM process in a reliable manner. In order to demonstrate the operation process of the proposed ISERM, an application of smart grid (SG) is taken as an example. The proposed ISERM considers the functional components of system, adopts software engineering methods, as well as invokes the security threat types and risk assessment mechanism, so that indicates a considerable research direction of systematic threat modeling. Besides, the demonstrated practice also provides a valuable and practical reference for information security design on SG applications.