What is Threat Modeling?
Threat modeling is a structured security analysis process that identifies potential threats to a system, evaluates their likelihood and impact, and designs mitigations — before vulnerabilities are exploited in production.
WHY IT MATTERS
Threat modeling asks: 'what could go wrong?' before it does. For traditional software, threats include SQL injection, XSS, and unauthorized access. For AI agent financial systems, the threat landscape is broader and less well-understood.
Agent-specific threats include: prompt injection causing unauthorized transactions, hallucinated recipient addresses, runaway loops burning through budgets, compromised LLM providers manipulating agent behavior, key exfiltration through context manipulation, and social engineering through agent interfaces.
Effective threat modeling for agent systems uses frameworks like STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege) adapted for the agent context. Each threat gets a severity rating and a mitigation plan.
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
PolicyLayer's spending policies are built from threat models specific to AI agent financial attacks. Per-transaction limits mitigate runaway loops. Allowlists mitigate address manipulation. Rate limiting mitigates automated drain attacks.