Threat Modeling

Threat Modeling

Rules (for AI agents)

ALWAYS

• Produce a written list, not an impression. One row per finding, in the design doc, the RFC, or the PR description: (asset, boundary, threat, control, owner) — what is worth taking, where it crosses, what could go wrong there, what stops it, and which component enforces it. A model that exists only in the reasoning that produced the code cannot be reviewed, disagreed with, or checked later.
• Name the assets and the actors first: data, funds, credentials, keys and compute on one side; users, tenants, services, admins and the attacker on the other. Every later row references one of each, which is what makes the list finite.
• Locate the trust boundaries — internet to application, tenant to shared store, service to service, user input to an interpreter, model output to anything that acts on it. A boundary is where data arrives from a party you do not control, and it is the unit the rest of the model is organised around.
• At each boundary, ask the six STRIDE questions and write down only the answers that matter: can the caller be spoofed (is there authentication), can the data be tampered with in flight, will there be a record if someone repudiates the action, what is disclosed if this crossing leaks, what happens under denial of service, and does anything here allow elevation of privilege. A category with no answer is not a gap; a category nobody asked about is.
• Write down the assumptions the design depends on: this gateway is the only ingress, this queue's producers are authenticated, this field is already validated upstream, this CDN strips that header. Assumptions are the part of a threat model that later becomes false without anyone noticing, and an unwritten one cannot be rechecked.
• Rank the rows and say which ones block the design. A model that treats every threat as equally urgent gets implemented in whatever order the work happens to arrive, which means the ranking gets made anyway, by accident.
• Design controls to fail closed: on error, missing configuration, a timeout, or an unhandled case, the secure outcome is denial. This is a design property because the alternative is usually invisible in the code — an exception that skips a check reads exactly like an exception that skips a log line.
• Put each control at the component that owns the asset, behind any gateway rather than instead of it. The owning service authenticates and authorizes even when a perimeter also does, because perimeters get bypassed, reconfigured, and eventually routed around by the next service that needs direct access.
• Re-run the model when its inputs change — a new actor, a new boundary, a new data flow for an existing asset, a component moving between trust zones, or an assumption you wrote down turning out to be false. A model is a statement about a design, so it expires when the design moves.
• Route each control to the skill that owns it, and record that in the row's owner. auth-security owns who the caller is and what they may touch, api-security the endpoint's own controls, database-security how tenant isolation is actually enforced, iam-best-practices the privileges a workload runs with, and llm-app-security what a model's output is allowed to reach. This skill decides which controls the design requires; those skills say what the control is.

NEVER

• Treat anything the client controls as a control — hidden fields, disabled buttons, client-side role checks, an unverified token, a price in the request body. All of it is advisory. This is the design-level statement of a rule several code skills enforce, and it belongs here because it is usually decided before any code is written.
• Design a component that is trusted because of where it sits. "Internal service", private subnet, VPN, IP allowlist: those describe reachability, and reachability is not authentication. api-security owns the endpoint-level rule; the design-level version is that a trust boundary drawn around a network segment has no enforcement behind it.
• Invent a bespoke authentication, session, or access-control primitive when a vetted one exists. Design in the standard building block — OIDC for identity, mTLS or SPIFFE for workload identity, a policy engine for authorization decisions. crypto-misuse owns the equivalent rule for cryptographic primitives.
• Add an external integration, dependency, or webhook without deciding three things in writing: who may call it, what it is trusted to assert, and what happens when the counterparty is compromised or impersonated. The third is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that determines blast radius.
• Leave a sensitive datum with no sanctioned home. For each one, name where it lives and, by implication, where it must not appear — logs, error payloads, client bundles, URL parameters, analytics. An undecided lifecycle is how a credential ends up in four places, none of them chosen.
• Ship a design whose security analysis is "we will add auth later". Retrofitting a trust boundary onto a built feature means changing the data model, and that is the point at which it does not happen.

KNOWN FALSE POSITIVES

• A genuinely public, read-only surface — marketing site, public docs, a public catalog — legitimately has no authentication. The model's job is to confirm it holds nothing sensitive and grants nothing, not to add auth to it.
• Network controls layered on top of service-level authentication are good design. The finding is network position as the sole control, never its presence.
• mTLS or SPIFFE workload identity is authentication — a cryptographic caller identity, not a network location — so a service-to-service call over it is not relying on network position.
• A design that reuses an existing, documented boundary without changing it inherits that boundary's model. The trigger is a new or moved boundary; a fifth endpoint behind the same authenticated, tenant-scoped surface as the other four is not a new model.

Context (for humans)

The output is the point. Threat modeling done as a discussion produces agreement that evaporates; done as a written list it produces something an implementer can work against and a reviewer can disagree with. That is why the first rule is about the artifact rather than about the analysis — the analysis is worthless if it does not land anywhere.

For AI-assisted development the failure mode is specific and worth naming: models produce clean, working, well-tested code that implements an insecure design. Tenant data commingled in one table behind an application-enforced filter. Authorization checked at a gateway that the service also exposes directly. A credential whose lifecycle nobody decided. None of these is a bad line of code, so nothing that reads lines will find them — they are only visible at the altitude where someone asks what the system is supposed to guarantee.

The assumptions register is the part most often skipped and the part that ages worst. Designs are usually secure given something: that a gateway is the only way in, that a producer is authenticated, that a field was validated upstream. Those statements are true when written and silently become false — a second ingress is added, a queue gets a new producer — and nobody rechecks a claim that was never written down.

References

• references/design-level-failures.md — worked examples of designs that scanners cannot flag, a filled-in (asset, boundary, threat, control, owner) list for one realistic feature, and the division of labour with the code-level skills
• OWASP Threat Modeling Cheat Sheet.
• Microsoft STRIDE threat model.