What it means
They complement normal use cases by considering hostile goals, unauthorized actors, boundary violations, resource exhaustion, fraud, data exposure, and harmful sequences of otherwise valid actions.
Why it matters
Thinking like an adversary during requirements and design reveals protections that happy-path functional stories often miss.
Practical focus
- Identify valuable assets and attacker goals
- Describe preconditions, actions, and expected harm
- Map each case to prevention, detection, and recovery requirements
- Convert important cases into tests
Common mistakes
- Listing generic threats with no system context
- Focusing only on invalid input
- Ignoring authenticated abuse
- Failing to trace cases into requirements and tests
Certification relevance
This subject appears in or supports the following certification bodies of knowledge: