Security Champions and Threat Modeling

A Security Champion is a developer or engineer embedded in a product team who acts as a security liaison. They are not a full security professional but have extra security training and advocate for security practices within their team.

A champion program scales security knowledge across the organization:

• 1-2 champions per product team
• Regular training and security team meetings
• Responsible for security reviews in their team
• Bridges communication between development and security teams
• Reduces the bottleneck of centralized security reviews

Threat modeling is a structured analysis of potential threats to a system before building it. It answers:

• What are we building?
• What can go wrong?
• What are we going to do about it?
• Did we do a good enough job?

STRIDE is the most common threat modeling taxonomy:

• Spoofing — impersonating another user or system
• Tampering — modifying data or code
• Repudiation — denying performing an action
• Information disclosure — exposing data to unauthorized parties
• Denial of service — disrupting availability
• Elevation of privilege — gaining unauthorized permissions

Threat modeling starts with a Data Flow Diagram showing:

• Processes — application components
• Data stores — databases, files, caches
• External entities — users, third-party APIs
• Data flows — how data moves between components
• Trust boundaries — where privilege changes

Apply each STRIDE category to each element:

• At each trust boundary crossing: Spoofing, Tampering
• At each data store: Tampering, Information Disclosure
• At each process: all STRIDE categories apply
• For each data flow: Tampering, Information Disclosure

PASTA is a risk-centric, seven-stage threat modeling methodology:

1. Define business objectives
2. Define technical scope
3. Application decomposition
4. Threat analysis
5. Vulnerability and weakness analysis
6. Attack modeling
7. Risk and impact analysis

Threat model:

• When designing new features or systems
• When architecture changes significantly
• After a security incident (update the model)
• Annually for critical systems

Early threat modeling prevents expensive rework — architecture changes are cheap before code is written.

Tools for threat modeling:

• OWASP Threat Dragon — free, web-based DFD editor
• Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool — STRIDE-focused, Windows-based
• IriusRisk — enterprise, integrates with Jira
• draw.io — simple manual DFDs

Security champions make threat modeling accessible:

• Frame threats as user stories: "As an attacker, I can..."
• Map threats to OWASP Top 10 for familiarity
• Create security requirements tickets in the same backlog
• Measure security debt alongside technical debt

Deliverables from a threat model:

• Threat register listing all identified threats
• Risk rating per threat (likelihood × impact)
• Mitigations for each threat
• Security requirements for the backlog
• DFD documented and stored with the design docs

In the STRIDE model, which category describes an attacker modifying data in transit between two systems?

Security Champions embed security knowledge in product teams, scaling security without bottlenecks. Threat modeling (STRIDE, PASTA) identifies threats before code is written using Data Flow Diagrams. STRIDE categories: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, DoS, Elevation of Privilege. Output: threat register with risk ratings and backlog security tickets.