Development of an information security threat model for building information modelling (BIM) systems at the design stage of capital construction facilities

Abstract

Mandatory creation of a digital information model for design documentation has changed the composition of protected assets: design decisions now exist as a machine-readable dataset handed over repeatedly between design organisations. Industry descriptions of threats concentrate on network access to the common data environment, whereas the priority realisation path has been chosen from general reasoning rather than from a verifiable list of recorded vulnerabilities. The study builds an information security threat model for the design stage of a capital construction facility from primary material. The material comprises 542 National Vulnerability Database records on 31 building information modelling products of four vendors, added between 18 January 2021 and 6 August 2026. Every record carrying a CVSS version 3.1 base score was coded by software class, realisation path, carrier format category, defect class and violated information properties. A subsample was checked by hand, two coding rules were compared and shares were recomputed year by year. The path requiring a designer to process an untrusted project file covers 98.7% of the records, whereas network impact appears in 5 records only. In 61.4% of the records the carrier is a format external to the design environment. Memory faults during parsing account for 94.8% of the records and loss of all three information properties for 86.7%. The distribution moves the threat model from the network perimeter towards the handling of files supplied by partner organisations, and yields six ranked scenarios of verified order.