Auspex: Building Threat Modeling Tradecraft into an Artificial Intelligence-Based Copilot

We present Auspex - a threat modeling system built using a specialized collection of generative artificial intelligence-based methods that capture threat modeling tradecraft. This new approach, called tradecraft prompting, centers on encoding the on-the-ground knowledge of threat modelers within the prompts that drive a generative AI-based threat modeling system. Auspex employs tradecraft prompts in two processing stages. The first stage centers on ingesting and processing system architecture information using prompts that encode threat modeling tradecraft knowledge pertaining to system decomposition and description. The second stage centers on chaining the resulting system analysis through a collection of prompts that encode tradecraft knowledge on threat identification, classification, and mitigation. The two-stage process yields a threat matrix for a system that specifies threat scenarios, threat types, information security categorizations and potential mitigations. Auspex produces formalized threat models in minutes, relative to the weeks or months a manual process takes. The focus on tradecraft prompting, as opposed to fine-tuning or agent-based add-ons, makes Auspex a lightweight, flexible, modular, and extensible foundational system capable of addressing the complexity, resource, and standardization limitations of both existing manual and automated threat modeling processes. We establish the baseline value of Auspex to threat modelers through an evaluation procedure based on feedback collected from cybersecurity experts measuring the quality and utility of threat models generated by Auspex on real banking systems. We conclude with a discussion of system performance and plans for enhancements to Auspex.