SECAI Core · phase 11 of 15 · noun

Spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, DoS, and elevation of privilege

Threat model developed by Microsoft.

The Explain card

Plain English
STRIDE is Microsoft's threat modelling framework. It names six threat categories: spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, denial of service, and elevation of privilege, and walks each component through them.
Example
Threat modelling an LLM agent with STRIDE, a team asks: can a tool output spoof a user message? Can a document tamper with instructions? Can the model leak the system prompt? Can a prompt escalate its permissions?
Why it matters
STRIDE gives AI defenders a structured checklist so they stop reviewing only the headline risks and cover the quieter failure modes too.
Hook
Six doors on every component; walk through each one.

Word knowledge

How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.

In a sentence

Engineers check an API gateway for spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, DoS, and elevation of privilege before approving its authentication and logging design.

Why these words
  • spoofing English spoof plus -ing; spoof appeared in the 1880s, originally as the name of a hoaxing game supplies the S in STRIDE
  • tampering English tamper plus -ing; tamper developed from Middle English temperen supplies the T in STRIDE
  • repudiation Latin repudiatio, rejection, through English repudiate plus -ion supplies the R in STRIDE
  • information disclosure Latin informatio joined with disclosure, from disclose plus -ure supplies the I in STRIDE through information
  • DoS English initialism of denial of service supplies the D in STRIDE through denial
  • elevation of privilege Latin elevatio joined by of to privilege, from Latin privilegium supplies the E in STRIDE through elevation
Where it came from
Origin
English expansion of STRIDE, an acronym coined at Microsoft from the six category initials
Entered the language
c. 1999
What changed
Existing English security terms were ordered so their initials formed STRIDE, while DoS retained its established mixed-case abbreviation.
How it is spelled
Pattern
The six principal initials occur in the order S, T, R, I, D, E.
Pattern
The common nouns are lowercase, while DoS preserves internal capitalization.
Pattern
Commas separate the coordinated items, including a comma before and.
Breaks the pattern
DoS is an initialism embedded among words written in full.

Spelled like

  • DDoS
  • QoS
Broken into chunks
  • spoof
    • spoofed
    • spoofer
  • tamper
    • tampered
    • tamperproof
  • repudi
    • repudiate
    • repudiable
  • inform
    • informative
    • misinformation
  • disclos
    • disclose
    • disclosable
  • elev
    • elevate
    • elevator
  • privileg
    • privileged
    • unprivileged
What it sits beside

Same subject

  • attack surface
  • trust boundary
  • abuse case
  • security control
  • threat modeling

Same shape

  • confidentiality, integrity, and availability
  • identification, authentication, and authorization

gerunds

  • spoofing
  • tampering

action and result nouns

  • repudiation
  • disclosure
  • elevation

mixed-case initialisms

  • DoS
  • DDoS
  • QoS

Where it sits in the deck

Phase 11: Threat Landscape: Attack Vectors and Adversarial Techniques

With defences named, learn what they must defend against — the full catalogue of attack techniques targeting AI systems, their inputs, outputs, training pipelines, and supply chains.

Neighbours in this phase