The Unkeynote: challenging the Threat Modeling Manifesto in Vienna
Adrienne Dandy, Shostack + Associates
It's a trap. (The trap being: can five Threat Modeling Manifesto working group members sit on the ThreatModCon EU Unkeynote stage together and agree on how AI requires them to amend their own work?)
We love how ThreatModCon EU starts!
The Unkeynote is ThreatModCon’s flagship opening event. It’s definitely not your typical keynote where someone gives a polished speech to a packed room. Instead, it's a dynamic panel of brilliant folks from the field who dive straight into real questions, swap raw experiences, and debate where the industry’s actually headed. It’s exactly the kind of amazing chat you’d normally have over dinner after the briefings finish, but brought right to the center stage!
This year’s topic is just perfect for that treatment.
The Threat Modeling Manifesto in the age of AI: still true, or due for amendment?
The Threat Modeling Manifesto laid out some key human-centric principles for how we do threat modeling. Tomorrow, five members of the working group that created the Manifesto in 2020 will sit down and openly challenge those very principles!
And no, it’s not just a rhetorical move. Stephen de Vries, Adam Shostack, Irene Michlin, Kim Wuyts, and Izar Tarandach are all part of that working group, and they're all active practitioners. All of them have been on the Unkeynote stage before. Why wouldn’t you want to see a stage full of creators willing to question their own work in one of the most exciting chats of the entire year?
The question they’re taking to Vienna is a massive one: as AI radically reshapes software architecture, secure development, and risk assessment, do the core ideas of the Manifesto still stand?
What happens to teamwork, system understanding, and responsibility when AI-driven systems and tools come into play? Do probabilistic controls and automated threat detection actually support the Manifesto’s values, or do they completely blow them up? The panel will explore whether the Manifesto needs an update, a stronger stance, or clear safeguards for AI-heavy engineering environments. We don’t know where it’ll end up, which is kind of the point.
Adam will be on the panel, and Erik Service, our senior consultant and one of our instructors, will be right there in the audience. If you’re at ThreatModCon EU, this is absolutely where you want to be! If you can't make it, don't worry, we’ll be sharing all the incredible insights that come out of it. You can also catch Adam and Erik at our ThreatModCon booth.
The Unkeynote kicks off at 9am CEST on June 27, right after registration.
Thanks to the team at Threat Modeler for creating the header graphic for the Unkeynote. The Boromir meme was created using the imgflip meme generator.