Threat model
A maintained description of a system, its assets and trust boundaries, plausible failure or abuse scenarios, and the controls and decisions addressing them. The Threat Modeling Manifesto frames it as four questions: what are we working on, what can go wrong, what are we going to do about it, and did we do a good enough job?
- Also called
- threat modeling
- Defined in
- Threat Modeling Manifesto
Covered in
Choose a threat modeling method and turn its findings into tests
Use the four-question frame to scope a design, pick STRIDE, attack trees, LINDDUN or PASTA by the question you need answered, and leave behind threat records and abuse-case tests the team can run.
Review tenant boundaries before implementation
Trace tenant identity through requests, data stores, caches, jobs, and administration, then turn plausible isolation failures into tests.
Worked threat model: a mobile banking app
A complete worked threat model for a mobile banking-style app: the data-flow diagram and its elements, STRIDE threats on the client, the transport and the backend, and the mitigations mapped to OWASP MASVS v2 controls and current Android and iOS platform APIs.
Worked threat model: an LLM agent with tools
A complete worked threat model for an LLM agent with tools: the data-flow diagram, the threats from prompt injection, excessive agency, data exfiltration, confused-deputy and memory poisoning, and the mitigations, mapped to the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2026 and the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications 2026.
Threat pattern library for threat modeling
Thirty-two recurring threat patterns grouped by identity, authorization, parsers, concurrency, integrations, data exposure, supply chain, availability and AI agents, each with where it shows up on a data-flow diagram, mitigations, a verification step and STRIDE, CWE and CAPEC links, plus a YAML catalog and a script that lists patterns per diagram element.
Write testable security requirements and a security Definition of Done
Derive security requirements from OWASP ASVS 5.0, abuse cases and the threat model, write them as acceptance criteria a test can fail, trace each one to a test or evidence, and close stories against a short security Definition of Done.