OCTAVE Threat Methodology
What Is OCTAVE?
OCTAVE is a framework for detecting, categorizing, and prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities in applications and IT systems, primarily for small to midsize businesses. Short for Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability Evaluation, the OCTAVE methodology employs a business-oriented approach that focuses on quantitative risk weighting and organizational risks to protect assets.
What Are the Elements of OCTAVE?
OCTAVE is a self-directed interdisciplinary exercise, meaning that a small team—often comprising members of various business and IT units—can conduct a multi-faceted analysis and recommend risk mitigation measures unique to the overall organization. This comprehensive, collaborative approach typically examines operational risk and security practices rather than the underlying technology.
OCTAVE is organized around three activities:
- Asset-based threat profiling: This pan-organizational view assesses critical information assets and their security requirements as well as organizational vulnerabilities and current security practices. The team identifies critical assets and describes security requirements and threat profiles for each.
- Infrastructure vulnerability identification: This technological view assesses an organization’s computing structure. The team identifies the components related to each critical asset and determines their resistance to attacks.
- Security strategy development: The team develops protection and mitigation plans for critical assets.
Other iterations of the OCTAVE framework include OCTAVE-S, a simplified version designed for small organizations, and OCTAVE Allegro, a more complex variant that focuses on information assets and related risks.
How Is OCTAVE Implemented?
OCTAVE features a series of workshops facilitated by an interdisciplinary analysis team to gather and filter working knowledge across the organization. Phases 1 (threat profiling) and 2 (vulnerability identification) can be performed in parallel, culminating in strategy development in Phase 3.
OCTAVE-S is purpose-built for organizations with fewer than 100 people, with smaller analysis teams and a commensurately limited examination of organizational infrastructure. OCTAVE Allegro departs from the three-phase framework with a four-phase approach: developing risk measurement criteria consistent with organizational objectives, profiling information assets, identifying threats against those assets, and focusing on risk mitigation plans.
What Are the Benefits of the OCTAVE Model?
OCTAVE’s organization-centric approach offers great flexibility to businesses based on their unique assets, resources, and risk profiles.
- Asset-centric view: By focusing on assets first and providing relevant insights into risk prioritization, OCTAVE supports non-security stakeholders such as developers and other decision-makers.
- Self-directed and adaptable: OCTAVE empowers organizations to manage their own risk assessments in a process that can be tailored to specific needs and constraints.
- Higher organizational security awareness: The cross-functional collaboration central to OCTAVE promotes awareness among non-security units and teams.
What Are the Shortcomings of the OCTAVE Model?
OCTAVE is a highly customizable approach, but it leaves security strategy largely to internal IT teams and does not scale well.
- Limited perspective: OCTAVE relies on the knowledge already contained within an organization, presuming that teams have all the required information and resources. This approach may miss external factors or idiosyncratic threats in addition to creating a false sense of security in the organization. Risk assessments are not one-and-done exercises—they must be constantly updated as technology landscapes and threat environments evolve.
- Resource intensity: With its workshop-based approach, OCTAVE can be time-consuming and heavy on documentation. Unclear guidelines for collaboration and communication can confound the process and derail implementation.
Other Threat Modeling Frameworks
OCTAVE is one of a variety of threat modeling frameworks that are commonly used to identify and address potential vulnerabilities:
- PASTA: The Process for Attack Simulation and Threat Analysis is a seven-step methodology for simulating attacks that combines an attacker-centric technical analysis with assessing and minimizing business risks and impacts. However, PASTA is complex and resource-intensive, inhibiting scaling and development agility.
- STRIDE: One of the first threat modeling frameworks, STRIDE was designed to help developers remember common security threats: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege. STRIDE has many variants but remains restricted by its static framework and manual processes.
- Trike Threat Modeling: This open-source framework emphasizes stakeholder-defined risk, meaning that the assigned level of risk for each asset is acceptable to stakeholders. This approach requires a high level of expertise for its quantitative evaluations.
- VAST: Visual, Agile, and Simple Threat modeling provides an enterprise-centric view of risks using a dual-track system that provides visual models for application and operational analysis. Unlike other frameworks, VAST is designed for scalability and seamless integration into agile workflows.
Factors to Consider with Threat Modeling Frameworks
In selecting a threat modeling framework (or frameworks), an organization should consider these questions, among others:
- Organizational goals: How extensive an assessment is required? What are the key considerations for implementation?
- System complexity: What level of complexity are you encountering? Does the system in question include multiple connected components or third-party integrations?
- Resource availability: How much staff time is available for a cross-functional exercise? Is the required expertise available in-house?
- Technology requirements: Does the framework integrate well with existing tools and workflows, including modern development methodologies?
In some cases, combinations of frameworks can lead to more thorough assessments. However, to produce stronger security postures, the chosen framework should offer practical benefits in integration and scalability.
VAST: A Scalable Enterprise Threat Modeling Framework
The VAST framework was created to address the shortcomings of manual threat modeling processes like OCTAVE and make threat modeling scalable. Unlike OCTAVE, VAST is ideal for large organizations with complex, interconnected systems, producing actionable threat models quickly without the need for resource-intensive workshopping cycles.
Designed for automation and seamless integration into modern development environments, VAST’s ability to handle both application and operational threat modeling ensures comprehensive coverage. Like OCTAVE, VAST’s conceptual simplicity to threat modeling makes collaboration easier for non-technical stakeholders.
This practical approach is a key differentiator of the VAST methodology. ThreatModeler was founded on the same principle, leveraging VAST frameworks to scale threat modeling and provide actionable outputs that are seamlessly integrated within agile development workflows.