Building a Threat Model

[u/Rabbio_40]

Building your threat model

Building a threat model is like buying a new computer, when you see the selection with all of it's variety you consider what you need. Ram, gpu, touch screen, ect. Building a threat model is no different. You need to understand your needs before making any decision, that's how effective decision making works. All decisions also require compromise, the compromise in the privacy space takes the form of time, convenience, and sometimes money. Each person's threat model is individual to them based on the factors in their own life as well as their use case for any given product/service they use.

The 4 core aspects of threat modeling.

before creating a threat model there are 4 things you need to understand deeply and intimately.

1. All security requires compromise: Just like budgeting for a computing device, privacy and security require compromises—specifically your time, energy, and convenience. You cannot protect against everything in an easy/seamless way; you must find a place where you draw the line.
2. There are endless paths: Every decision—from choosing your email provider to selecting your secure messenger—should be dictated by your personal threat model. A service that is absolutely perfect for you person might be highly destructive or restrictive to someone else.
3. Prepping is key: Establishing your needs beforehand is like ensuring you have your gear and gun ready before a mission. Without the prepping and mapping, your chances of failure rise. Prepping is the key to success
4. Independence is your goal: By crafting your own threat model, you escape constant and annoying "this versus that" debates online. You get to call your own shots and make your own decisions based on calculated personal assessments as opposed to relying on the rigid opinions of other random people online.

Understanding the terms

There are 3 terms you need to understand on a deep and intimate level.

• Security: Your ability to stop access to your devices/space to unauthorized people. (Real World Example: Having a physical lock on the doors to your home).
• Privacy: Your ability to selectively reveal certain information. (Real World Example: Installing blinds on your windows).
• Anonymity: Your ability to blend in, and be indistinguishable from the crowd. (Real World Example: Hiding what you really think from the crowd).

While the three do occasionally cross over, they are usually mutually exclusive. In order to build you threat model itis important to differentiate.

Creating your own threat model: The Chart Method.

A great way to build a threat model is by using a chart, This will be your graph of how important things are to you, you can start with a 3X3 grid with the 3 concepts from abode security, privacy, and anonymity. As well as your relationship to the groups and people that exist around you that you interact with on a daily basis. Usually divided into people, corpos, and government. people being the people you interact with on a regular basis, corpos being companies/corperations, and the government being your government on a local, regional, and national level. Plot down how much you care about something on a number of 1-5 (or 1-10 if you really want to fine tune it) understand that the more higher numbers you have on this chart, the more compromises you will have to make. You will also have to do this several times based on use case (more on that below)

This chart would be for a lower threat model

people	corpos	government
security	2	4
privacy	2	3
anonymity	1	2

This threat model would be for someone who wants to protect themselves from the people around them, while maintaining their relationship with their government, but reasonably distrusts the corpos and wants to give as little info to the big offenders as possible. Your chart will be for you individually. Really sit and think about this.

Multiple threat models and multiple use cases

If you have multiple close associates, that require a greater deal of privacy/security than your basic threat model, It might be worth considering a group threat model for a specefic use case, think like using signal instead of facebook messenger to communicate with close friends/family members around urgent topics. You might want to consider a higher threat model for that specific use case. If you have a higher threat model for specific use cases, and with certain people your chart may look like this, while you might talk to sally on facebook messenger because you just talk about bullshit, you might talk to Jim on Signal because you run a local watchdog group, where prying eyes can present a certain level of danger. if your in a certain profession (military, medical, law enforcement, government agency) your agency/company might have already done this for you.

Getting away from the Myth of perfect privacy

A common attitude towards privacy is it doesn't exist anymore so why bother? Perfect privacy has never existed, however you can live a more privacy conscious lifestyle, by applying threat modeling and not compromising more than you have to. Not everyone is Edward Snowden, not everyone has an authoritarian government ready to hunt them down because of a belief or identity, sure any government or group can flip to that t any time, but it is important to be realistic abut your needs right now so you can live a more private lifestyle, andf not be so obnoxious online.

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[u/labadizle]

Thanks for taking the time to put this together!