Implementing Secure Design Principles

Secure design starts with comprehensive threat modeling—systematically identifying potential attackers, their capabilities, and their goals. Use frameworks like STRIDE (Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, Elevation of Privilege) to structure this analysis. For each feature, ask: "How could an attacker abuse this?" and "What security controls prevent that abuse?"

Implement security patterns and reference architectures proven to resist common attacks. Use established authentication frameworks rather than building custom solutions. Design with the principle of least privilege, ensuring each component has only the minimum access required. Build in rate limiting, monitoring, and alerting from the beginning. Create abuse cases alongside use cases, explicitly documenting how features might be misused. Remember, secure design isn't about perfection—it's about making exploitation difficult and detectable enough that attackers move on to easier targets.