8 Secure Architecture Review and Practice Free Online FlashCards

What does a security architecture review assess?

It tests whether a system design can meet security, privacy, availability, and business requirements under realistic failure and attack conditions.

What should be established before examining controls?

Define the purpose and potential harms, included and excluded components, applicable requirements, participants, and evidence to gather.

What should a useful architecture review diagram show?

Show components, data flows, trust boundaries, administrative paths, external dependencies, and where controls are enforced.

What makes a threat scenario specific rather than vague?

Specify a threat source and starting condition, the action and system path, the affected asset or mission outcome, and the weakness that makes the harm plausible.

How should threat scenarios be prioritized?

Prioritize using business impact and likelihood, while recording uncertainty. Qualitative labels such as low, medium, and high organize discussion but are not precise measurements.

How can controls reduce risk from a stolen service credential?

Limit service identities to necessary operations, and restrict services to the data endpoints they require.

What is the access principle emphasized by zero-trust approaches?

Verify access to individual resources rather than trusting users or services simply because of their network location.

Why must cloud customers verify control responsibilities?

Provider capabilities do not automatically meet customer requirements; confirm who operates each control and whether configuration, data location, logging, and recovery are adequate.

What demonstrates that backups support resilience?

Protect backups from compromise or deletion, and test restoration—not just backup creation—against approved recovery objectives.

What does using a control catalog establish—and not establish?

A control catalog helps identify candidate controls to tailor to system context and risk; inclusion in a catalog does not prove the system is secure.

How should residual risk and its acceptance be handled?

Record assumptions, alternatives, chosen controls, dependencies, owners, and residual risk. Risk acceptance belongs to an authorized role, not silently to the reviewer.

How does validation differ from a design review?

A design review defines expected behavior; validation checks whether the implemented system actually behaves that way.