Welcome to an exciting course about the challenge of doing threat modelling and risk assessments of IT infrastructures in modern organisations. Mastering this challenge is of course key for any successful business and our society at large. Hope you will enjoy the course!

The easiest way to contact us, the teachers, is by Canvas or email.

/Mathias, Yekatierina, and Yacine

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Maybe you want to jump directly to the course syllabus page.

Zoom room: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/62309989525 , Passcode: KTH-EP279

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Motivation

Companies today have thousands of software-based computer systems that are depending on one another by complex interconnections; a system-of-systems. That cyberattacks succeed is to a large extent due to this complexity. The security engineers at a company need to understand the whole system with all its potential vulnerabilities, while an attacker only needs find one way in. Luckily for the defenders, as they have access to the system environment they don't have to start on a blank sheet and discover the environment as the attacker has to do. To add to the complexity, attackers can use a large number of different attack techniques but there also exist plenty of defense mechanisms. Coming up with and maintaining an overall defence solution that at the same time enables the supported business to thrive is a great challenge.

This course teaches a threat modeling-based method for analyzing cybersecurity risks for systems-of-systems. It includes developing and combining models for computer system resilience, threat actor capabilities, and business impacts of realized threats into an overall cyber risk assessment. Moreover the course addresses how cyber risk analysis is used for identifying and arguing for cost efficient defense mechanism selection for protecting the analyzed system-of-systems.

Intended learning outcomes

After passing the course, the student should be able to:

model in detail the architectures of large-scale computer systems (including software, networks, etc.)
carefully and well balanced describe and evaluate threats and attacks in complex computer systems
clearly describe defense mechanisms for computer systems and how these relate to vulnerabilities and attacks
carry out qualified and well balanced risk analyses based on system models
in a professional manner report and present models, cybersecurity risk analyses, and defense strategies for a computer system

in order to

understand and explain which threats a specific system can have
understand and explain how attacks work and propagate through a system architecture
argue why certain risks should be prioritised
choose an effective defense to decrease risks.