Threat Modeling & Risk Assessment

Systematically identifying what could go wrong, before it does — frameworks like STRIDE and risk scoring.

What it is

Threat modeling is the structured process of identifying potential threats to a system before building or shipping it, so mitigations can be designed in rather than bolted on.

Key points

STRIDE is a common framework: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, Elevation of privilege — a checklist for walking through a system diagram.
Risk = likelihood × impact — this is how findings get prioritized; a high-impact but very-unlikely threat may rank below a lower-impact but common one.
Attack surface is the sum of all points where an attacker could try to get in or out — reducing it (fewer exposed endpoints, fewer trust boundaries) is often cheaper than adding more detection.
Threat modeling is most valuable done early, at design time, when changing the architecture is still cheap.