threat-modeling

threat-modeling is a skill for Claude Code from briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills. It costs 111 tokens per session (2,571 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design-time security review for a planned feature, system, or architecture. It uses methods such as STRIDE, attack trees, data-flow diagrams, and abuse cases to identify how a system could be attacked.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define the scope, list possible threats, choose mitigations, and review security decisions for a proposed system or feature.
Why use it?
It helps uncover security problems before code is written or an architecture is committed. This is useful when handling authentication, payments, private personal data, external integrations, or new services.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the cybersecurity-skills plugin — 28 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to define the scope, list possible threats, choose mitigations, and review security decisions for a proposed system or feature.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills --skill threat-modeling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cybersecurity-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 28 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for threat-modeling

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for threat-modeling

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills/threat-modeling.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,571 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 84
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00111 $0.02571
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.01286
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00514
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00257

Measured 12d ago against content hash b0d403f72fc6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

threat-modeling scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/threat-modeling/SKILL.md · 211 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 211 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Threat Modeling — Pre-Implementation Security Design

Run a structured threat-modeling session against a proposed feature, system, or architecture. This is the design-time security skill — different from audit (which inspects code that exists). Use this when there's a design doc, a feature spec, an architecture diagram — but not yet code.

When to use:

  • New feature touching auth, payments, multi-tenant data, or sensitive PII
  • New external integration (third-party API, OAuth provider, webhook receiver)
  • New service / microservice being added to the architecture
  • Significant refactor of a security-sensitive component
  • Before committing to a major architecture decision (event-driven vs request/response, monolith split, AI-feature introduction)

Cross-references: owasp-audit (code-level checklist that lines up with the threats this surfaces), api-audit (API-specific category mapping), iam-audit (identity decisions touch every threat model).

The four questions

Adam Shostack's framing — every threat model answers these four:

  1. What are we working on? (Scope and model)
  2. What can go wrong? (Threats)
  3. What are we going to do about it? (Mitigations)
  4. Did we do a good job? (Validation)

The rest of this skill walks through each in order.

Step 1 — What are we working on?

Produce a Data Flow Diagram (DFD) at one of three levels:

  • Level 0 — Context diagram. One bubble for the system, lines to every external entity (users, third-party APIs, internal admin tools). Use this when the question is "what does this system even touch?"
  • Level 1 — Major processes. Auth service, API gateway, primary data store, payment integration, etc. Use this for most feature-level threat models.
  • Level 2 — Detailed component model. Specific endpoints, specific tables, specific queues. Use this for the trickiest parts only.

A useful DFD has:

  • External entities (rectangles) — users, third-party services, admins
  • Processes (circles) — your services, functions, handlers
  • Data stores (parallel lines / cylinders) — databases, caches, blob storage, queues
  • Data flows (arrows, labeled with what crosses) — request bodies, tokens, files, events
  • Trust boundaries (dashed lines) — every crossing is a place data is validated, authenticated, or filtered

Read the full file on GitHub · 211 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 211 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A b0d403f72fc6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

threat-modeling is a skill published in the GitHub repository briiirussell/cybersecurity-skills (391 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 2,571 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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