# Enhancing Cybersecurity Through Comprehensive Investigation of Data Flow-Based Attack Scenarios
## 1 Introduction
The main contributions of this paper are outlined as follows:  
* **Impact Enumeration:** We explore the various ways that attackers can manipulate systems, providing valuable insights that can enhance system security. These insights serves as important inputs for security and system designers who must make crucial decisions during the design phase and prior to the implementation phase. We then evaluate attack scenarios and reveal underlying attack paths that enable early prediction of attacks during the system development life cycle. * **Attack Profile Generation:** Using the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool (STRIDE, TMT7), we generate a threat list from the data flow diagram of the system design. We then generate the attack profile in correspondence with the threat landscape of the system. The resulting profile enumerates the possible attacks with all possible sources and destinations. This profile can be used as a baseline for further security analyses, such as the threat impact of and depth of attack. In addition, we detect attack surfaces, provide an API (Application Programming Interface) for creating attack scenarios, and present an extensive collection of attack scenarios based on attackers' behavior. The generated attack profiles assist system designers in proactively anticipating potential attacks and enhancing overall system security. * **Attack Impact Analysis:** We conduct an in-depth analysis to understand how system analysts and designers can use these attack scenarios to secure their systems during the design phase. System designers must make critical decisions at this stage prior to implementation, and as a result can greatly benefit from this analysis. By mapping all potential attack paths, we evaluate the impact on strengthening the system against cyberattacks that can be obtained by addressing each vulnerability. This approach offers system designers a prioritized list of vulnerabilities to address based on their contributions to various attack paths. While quantitative comparisons with existing methods are beyond the scope of this study, our approach offers several qualitative advantages. These include a more comprehensive analysis of attack scenarios through systematic examination of data flows, a structured and repeatable threat identification process, and improved prioritization of security efforts based on detailed impact analysis. Future work will focus on quantifying these benefits through empirical studies and providing statistical evidence to complement the qualitative benefits presented in this paper. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present an overview of the techniques and terminology employed in this paper. Next, we outline our research methodology and discuss the contributions of this paper in Section 3. In Section 4, we illustrate our proposed approach step-by-step through a case study. Section 5 illustrates the results of the case study, while Section 6 discusses the results obtained in our experiments. The related work in the field is surveyed in Section 7. Finally, we conclude the study and outline directions for future research in Section 8.