Threat Modeling for Data Protection

When evaluating the security of an application and data model ask the questions:

• What is the sensitivity of the data?
• What are the regulatory, compliance, or privacy requirements for the data?
• What is the attack vector that a data owner is hoping to mitigate?
• What is the overall security posture of the environment, is it a hostile environment or a relatively trusted one?

Data When threat modeling, consider the following common scenarios:

Data at rest (“DAR”)

In information technology means inactive data that is stored physically in any digital form (e.g. database/data warehouses, spreadsheets, archives, tapes, off-site backups, mobile devices etc.).

• Transparent Data Encryption (often abbreviated to TDE) is a technology employed by Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2 and Oracle to encrypt the “table-space” files in a database. TDE offers encryption at the file level. It solves the problem of protecting data at rest by encrypting databases both on the hard drive as well as on backup media. It does not protect data in motion DIM nor data in use DIU.
• Mount-point encryption: This is another form of TDE is available for database systems which do not natively support table-space encryption. Several vendors offer mount-point encryption for Linux/Unix/Microsoft Windows file system mount-points. When a vendor does not support TDE, this type of encryption effectively encrypts the database table-space and stores the encryption keys separate from the file system. So, if the physical or logical storage medium is detached from the compute resource, the database table-space remains encrypted.