Concept / Term · Established
Security design practice
A structured way to identify what could attack a system, where trust boundaries and data flows create risk, and which controls are needed.
Field note
Threat modeling is a structured examination of what must be protected, who might attack it, how abuse could occur and which controls should reduce the risk.
The practice brings security reasoning into system design, before code and infrastructure make the most important trust boundaries expensive to change.
A cross-functional team diagrams data flows, identifies assets and trust boundaries, explores abuse cases and records mitigations and assumptions.
Checklists find common flaws; threat modeling reveals risks that are specific to how a particular product and its users behave.
In a sentence“The threat model showed that password reset, not sign-in, was the easiest account-takeover route.”