STRIDE Threat Modeling Fundamentals

Threat modeling is the practice of thinking through what could go wrong with a system before it's built, or before a change ships — not a penetration test, not a code review, but a structured design-time conversation. The Threat Modeling Manifesto (a set of principles published by a group of long-time practitioners, including Adam Shostack and the OWASP Threat Dragon and pytm project leads) frames the entire discipline around four questions: What are we working on? (scope), What can go wrong? (threats), What are we going to do about it? (mitigations), and Did we do a good job? (validation). Every technique in this roadmap is really just a structured way of answering the second question well.

STRIDE, developed at Microsoft in the late 1990s and still the most widely taught threat categorization scheme today, answers "what can go wrong" by giving you six concrete categories to check systematically instead of trying to brainstorm threats from nothing. That systematic-checklist quality is exactly why it's the right starting point for this roadmap — it turns an open-ended, easy-to-under-think exercise into a repeatable one.