Tools / Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool (TMT) Interview questions
Why is STRIDE-per-element considered more systematic than ad hoc brainstorming?
A free-form brainstorming session depends heavily on which specific people happen to be in the room and which attacks happen to occur to them that day, so coverage varies session to session and is hard to compare across teams or across time.
Walking every element against a fixed six-category checklist forces the reviewer to explicitly consider - and, if it doesn't apply, explicitly dismiss with a recorded reason - categories that might otherwise never come up unprompted. That's precisely why the Not Applicable state exists with a justification field rather than threats simply being absent: the presence of a documented "considered and dismissed" entry is what lets a second reviewer, or an auditor months later, verify that a category wasn't just overlooked.
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