Threat Modeling

Threat Modeling

Use this skill before or during significant trust-boundary changes to reason about security design. Keep it lightweight for feature work: identify what could go wrong, decide what must be true before ship, and name residual risks. Use security-review and security-review-evidence when findings must be verified against implemented controls and reported with sanitized evidence.

Use When

• Designing or changing authentication, authorization, tenancy, admin actions, invite/recovery flows, sessions, secrets, tokens, or sensitive-data flows.
• Adding or changing APIs, webhooks, uploads/downloads, imports/exports, plugins, command execution, browser storage, background jobs, integrations, or external service calls.
• The user asks for a threat model, abuse cases, STRIDE, attack trees, attack surface, trust boundaries, data flows, mitigations, residual risk, or security acceptance criteria.

Do not use this skill for ordinary code review, confirmed vulnerability validation, exploit reproduction, or dependency/SBOM/CVE/provenance review. Use security-review for concrete implemented-control review and dependency-supply-chain-review for supply-chain risk.

For a photo/video DAM, compose with digital-asset-management to identify media parsing, originals/derivatives, metadata, sharing, cache revocation, and retention data flows before applying threat-modeling methods.

Lightweight vs. Full Review

• Lightweight feature threat model: use during design or implementation to map actors, assets, entry points, data flows, trust boundaries, abuse cases, mitigations, assumptions, residual risks, and security acceptance criteria. It can be based on design docs, code paths, API contracts, and repository policy.
• Full security review: use after controls exist or when the task asks for validated findings. Load security-review and security-review-evidence, verify each claim with repository evidence, sanitize artifacts, and report findings through the review format.

Workflow

1. Inspect local sources first: SECURITY.md, architecture docs, threat models, auth/permission docs, API specs, data classification notes, deployment docs, tests, review templates, and relevant code paths. Do not read or print secrets.
2. Define scope: feature/system, in-scope actors, out-of-scope systems, environments, data classes, assumptions, and open questions.
3. Map the system:
   • actors and identities, including anonymous, authenticated, tenant, admin, service, integration, and malicious users;
   • assets and security properties: confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy, auditability, tenant isolation, and non-repudiation;
   • entry points and attacker-controlled inputs: HTTP/RPC, files, URLs, CLI, queues, webhooks, plugins, templates, browser state, environment variables, and third-party callbacks;
   • trust boundaries and privilege changes between client/server, tenant/admin, app/database, worker/queue, internal/external service, host/container, browser/server, and user-supplied/generated content;
   • data flows, storage, logs, telemetry, caches, exports, backups, retention, and deletion paths.
4. Enumerate abuse cases. Use STRIDE, attack trees, misuse cases, or attack-surface review only as tools; keep each case tied to an actor, entry point, affected asset, violated security property, and plausible path.
5. Select mitigations proportional to risk: server-side authorization, least-privilege scopes, input validation and canonicalization, structured APIs, rate limits, replay protection, CSRF/CORS/CSP, safe file handling, sandboxing, encryption, secret lifecycle controls, logging redaction, audit events, monitoring, rollback, and operational runbooks.
6. Convert mitigations into security acceptance criteria: tests, policy checks, review gates, config assertions, migration checks, observability requirements, rollout constraints, and explicit non-goals.
7. Record residual risk with owner, expiry/revisit trigger, compensating controls, and what evidence would be needed to close it. Escalate to full security review when a risk is concrete, disputed, high impact, or control verification matters.

Output Shape

Prefer a compact model the team can act on:

• Scope and assumptions
• Actors and assets
• Entry points, trust boundaries, and data flows
• Abuse cases and impact
• Mitigations and security acceptance criteria
• Residual risks, owners, and review handoffs

Anti-Patterns

• Producing a generic vulnerability checklist without the local actors, assets, entry points, trust boundaries, and data flows.
• Treating a design-time abuse case as a verified vulnerability without evidence.
• Requiring heavyweight security review ceremony for a small feature when a short model and concrete acceptance criteria are enough.
• Omitting residual risk, assumptions, or the handoff to verified security-review findings.
• Printing secrets, raw tokens, private host paths, credentialed URLs, or raw security artifacts while modeling risk.