Threat Modeling Process

Threat modeling turns information about a proposed change into actionable security recommendations. The input is a clear understanding of what’s being built—goals, key components, and relevant actors. The output is a set of prioritized recommendations to address potential risks and tradeoffs, along with documentation that serves as a reference for future iterations. It’s about embedding security early in the design process and providing teams with a roadmap to make informed, secure decisions.

Here’s how this template works: Start by gathering information about the project—what’s being built, why it’s being built, and how success is defined. Replace placeholders like user types, data types, and system components with specific details from your project. Talk to stakeholders to answer questions like who will interact with the system, what data flows through it, and which parts of the architecture are critical. Use this information to track recommendations from the Security team. From there, reuse the underlying data to streamline future threat modeling efforts and ensure consistency.

If you have any feedback about this process or run into any roadblocks while using it, please let me know. Your input helps refine and improve the framework so it works better for everyone. Thanks for giving it a try—I hope it makes threat modeling feel like a high-ROI practice in your engineering organization.