threat-model

Threat modeling is a structured process that adopts an attacker's perspective to proactively identify vulnerabilities in system designs. It improves secure design by shifting your mindset to analyze how systems can break, mapping out assets, adversaries, and attack paths before deployment.

To review an authentication flow for security vulnerabilities, apply a threat modeling framework to evaluate security controls against common attack vectors. This involves identifying assets, mapping potential attack paths, and verifying principles like defense-in-depth and least privilege are implemented.

Performing a risk assessment on a new system architecture requires evaluating security economics and defense principles from an attacker's mindset. You identify critical assets, profile potential adversaries, and trace attack vectors to expose vulnerabilities requiring mitigation.

You need to apply threat modeling to evaluate security controls during the security architecture review phase of system design. It is specifically required when assessing new authentication flows or verifying resilience against common attack vectors before deployment.

The limitation of adopting an attacker mindset for vulnerability analysis is that it requires a deep understanding of security economics, defense principles, and common attack vectors. Without this prerequisite knowledge, identifying subtle vulnerabilities in complex system designs becomes difficult.