Executive Summary
The Flaws That Live in the Architecture
Finding code-level flaws has become cheap. A frontier model can return a long list of them in minutes, and scanners have done a version of this for years. The risks in this guide are different. They live in the architecture, in the gap between what a system does and what it was intended to do, and tools that only read what is already in the code routinely miss them.
This guide catalogs ten architectural flaws that threat modeling finds. Each is classified against STRIDE for perspective, with its technical impact, its likely business impact, and an example of how it shows up in real systems. STRIDE is the standard mnemonic for security threats: Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information disclosure, Denial of service, and Elevation of privilege.
None of these flaws announce themselves. Several hide behind a control that is visibly in place but quietly ineffective, which is its own kind of risk: a false sense of security. Catching them takes a clear picture of intended design, kept current as the architecture changes. That is the step you can move but cannot skip, and it is what ThreatModeler® Nexus™ grounds every model in.
Written for a technical audience: the developers and architects who make and review design decisions day to day. Use it as a place to start looking, especially when the architecture changes
