Author, game designer, technologist, teacher.
Helped to create the CVE and many other things. Fixed autorun for XP. On Blackhat Review board.
Books include Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn from Star Wars (2023), Threat Modeling: Designing for Security, and The New School of Information Security.
Following back if you have content.
| Website | https://shostack.org |
| Latest book | https://threatsbook.com |
| Opsec status | Currently clean |
| Youtube | https://youtube.com/shostack |
Timo Jagush presenting on off boarding at #soups2025 , points out that frameworks are hard to navigate… framework creators have every motive to be “comprehensive”, but little motive to be usable.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2025/presentation/detsika
One of the hats I wear is editor for the @defcon Franklin Hackers' Almanack. If you see talks that policymakers should know about, please let me know here, tag me, etc.
I'm already seeing great stuff on voting security, resisting back doors, irresponsible behavior by thin-skinned vendors.. what else should I see?
New blog, LLMs as Compilers (1/8)
I want to explore the relationship of LLMs to compilers, inspired in part by articles like my AI skeptic friends are all nuts, in part by a lot of time spent exploring LLMs for threat modeling. (There, I feel like I should have more useful things to say before saying them.) And by the way, by “experimenting,” I don’t mean just vibe-threat-modeling (although I’ve done some), but rather carefully constructing prompts, feeding them to multiple engines, scoring the results, and evaluating the evaluations.1 That’s a slow process, but I still feel there’s could be something meaningful, if we can get there. The other inspiration was talking with a friend who builds static analysis tools a very large firm with a famously high bar for developer interviews. He mentioned that people are now checking in their LLM prompts.
Full text: https://is.gd/qh2qKZ
New blog, Risk Management and Threat Modeling
One the most common questions I’m asked is “what’s the relationship of threat modeling to risk management?” The simple answer is that threat modeling always precedes and sometimes feeds into risk management. Let me offer simple definitions: A threat is a possible future problem; a risk is a quantified threat. That quantification often applies to likelihood or impact. “The bully threatened to beat him up.” “There’s a 90% chance you’ll lose all your money in this startup investment.”
(1/7, full text https://is.gd/VvP5Bx)
