SAR

SecurityArchitectureReview(SAR)

Assessment of system architecture, trust boundaries, and data flows to identify security risks and prevent weaknesses before they reach production.

THREAT MODEL // TRUST BOUNDARIES // CONTROLS // REVIEW // THREAT MODEL // TRUST BOUNDARIES // CONTROLS // REVIEW

Service Overview

Security Architecture Review (SAR) focuses on identifying security weaknesses, design flaws, and architectural risks before and during implementation by analyzing how systems are designed rather than how they behave at runtime.

The review evaluates High-Level Design (HLD), Low-Level Design (LLD), and system design artifacts across applications, APIs, cloud environments, on-premises systems, hybrid architectures, and integrations. It focuses on how trust is established, how data flows across systems, and how security controls are applied across distributed components.

Using an attacker-centric approach, the objective is to identify insecure design decisions, implicit trust assumptions, and systemic weaknesses that could lead to exploitable conditions once implemented.

Attack Path Validation

From design decisions to exploitable conditions

Architectural components, trust boundaries, and workflows are analyzed to demonstrate how design-level weaknesses can be combined into attack paths that lead to unauthorized access, data exposure, or privilege escalation once deployed.

Benefits

Early identification of security risks

Detects design flaws before implementation or deployment.

Reduced remediation cost and effort

Fixing issues at design stage avoids costly rework later.

Stronger security by design

Ensures controls are correctly placed across system components.

Alignment with real-world attack scenarios

Evaluates how attackers would abuse architectural decisions.

Why Choose VulnXperts

What We Assess

A structured review of how system architecture, trust boundaries, and control placement introduce potential security risks across applications and infrastructure.

How we approach the review

The review is conducted through structured analysis of architecture and design artifacts, focusing on how decisions can be abused from an attacker perspective once implemented.

Review of architecture and design documentation (HLD, LLD, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, API contracts)
Analysis of system decomposition, service boundaries, and architectural patterns
Identification and validation of trust boundaries across components and integrations
Threat modeling and attacker-centric analysis (STRIDE, misuse cases, attack path modeling)
Review of data flows (data at rest, in transit, in use) and exposure risks
Authentication architecture review (OAuth, OIDC, SAML, federation risks)
Authorization model analysis (RBAC, ABAC, object-level access control)
Review of identity and access management design, including roles, service accounts, and privilege boundaries
Analysis of API and service-to-service communication patterns and associated trust relationships
Review of backend processing flows and asynchronous workflow interactions across components
Validation of business logic workflows, including state transitions, approvals, and race conditions
Identification of workflow abuse scenarios and potential logic bypass conditions
Review of input and output handling mechanisms and associated trust assumptions
Evaluation of secrets and key management design, including storage, rotation, and access control
Container and orchestration design (Kubernetes, isolation, service communication)
Review of logging and monitoring architecture to ensure security-relevant events are captured
Assessment of third-party integrations and dependency trust relationships
Identification of insecure architectural patterns and design-level weaknesses
Validation of security control placement and defense-in-depth implementation
Review of resilience and failure handling mechanisms from a security perspective

FAQs

Designing something new? Secure it from the start.

Tell us about your architecture. We will identify risks and help you build it securely.

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