Threat Modeling

It is far beyond the scope of this chapter to adequately teach many of the necessary disciplines of security so that you have a rigorous understanding of how modern workload security should be implemented and orchestrated. However, we will briefly gain an idea of how we should be thinking about it. Threat modeling is a discipline where we examine the various areas where our applications could be subject to an attack or unauthorized usage.

For example, consider an HTTP web server. It will typically have ports 80 and 443 exposed for serving web traffic, but it also acts as an entry point for any potential attackers. It may have a web management console exposed at a certain port. It may have certain other management ports open and API access to allow other software to manage it for automation purposes. The application runtime may need to regularly handle sensitive data. The entire end-to-end pipeline meant to create and deliver the application could expose various points...