What is a threat model?

Key Takeaways

A threat model is a document that you produce while you're designing an application and the whole point of it is to make sure you have all the appropriate mitigations in place. So for example, let's say you have a user talking to a web server as an example. Then one of the questions you have to ask is so how do I know that I'm talking to that web server? That's authentication. Technology do you use to make sure that really is the correct web server for authentication? And the answer is TLS. Generally the answer for that is TLS. Everything else is varying degrees of wrong from TLS. But how do you authenticate the client? And that could be say uh open ID connect, could be basic authentication. No, it shouldn't be basic authentication, but you get my drift, right? It's some kind of authentication for that user. Then you got data on the wire. So how is that data on the wire protected? And again, the correct answer there is TLS. Uh then you got things like process identity. Is it running at low low uh low privilege? And so these are questions that you ask while you're building a threat model.