Attack Trees

Attack trees are a structured method for analyzing system security by modeling how an attacker might achieve a goal.

As described by Bruce Schneier:

“Attack trees provide a formal, methodical way of describing the security of systems, based on varying attacks. You represent attacks in a tree structure, with the goal as the root node and different ways of achieving that goal as leaf nodes.”

When to Use Attack Trees

Attack trees can be used to:

• Identify threats
• Organize known threats
• Communicate attack paths
• Support structured analysis

They complement other approaches like STRIDE rather than replacing them.