Threat modeling¶
Threat modeling is the habit of asking, before you pick a tool, what exactly am I protecting, and from whom? It is the single most useful security skill, and also one of the few topics where the English-language canonical guide is genuinely hard to improve on.
We point outward on this one
EFF's Your Security Plan is the reference we use, and it is translated into Thai, Vietnamese, and Burmese among other languages. We don't reproduce it here. This page adds only the regional framing, then sends you there.
The five questions¶
EFF frames threat modeling as five questions, worth keeping on a single sheet of paper:
- What do I want to protect? (your data, your location, who you talk to)
- Who do I want to protect it from? (the adversary)
- How likely is it that I will need to protect it?
- How bad are the consequences if I fail?
- How much trouble am I willing to go through to prevent those?
Why the adversary is regional¶
The reason this matters on a Sinophone Asia-Pacific site: the adversary in question 2 changes shape across jurisdictions, and so does the cost in question 4. The same action, using a pseudonymous account, carrying a phone across a border, reaching a blocked service, carries very different consequences in Taipei, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, or across the Myanmar border. A threat model built for one jurisdiction does not transfer unchanged to the next. When you move across the region, re-run the five questions for where you are now.
For the vocabulary the five questions assume, see anonymity, privacy, pseudonymity, and confidentiality.
Where to go from here¶
- Your Security Plan — the canonical walkthrough, in multiple languages
- Anonymity, privacy, pseudonymity, and confidentiality — the four properties a plan trades between
- Scenarios — worked threat models for specific roles and situations