Tools / Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool (TMT) Interview questions
What is the difference between STRIDE and DREAD?
| STRIDE | DREAD |
| Classifies what kind of threat something is | Scores how severe an already-identified threat is |
| Six fixed categories | Five scored factors: Damage, Reproducibility, Exploitability, Affected users, Discoverability |
| Used by TMT to generate the threat list itself | Not used by TMT's default engine; teams sometimes layer it on manually for prioritization |
In short, STRIDE answers "what could go wrong here," while DREAD tries to answer "how bad would it be if it did." TMT ships a simple built-in Priority field rather than full DREAD scoring, so teams wanting DREAD-style rigor typically add it as a manual step on top of TMT's output rather than expecting the tool to compute it.
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