# ASTRIDE: A Security Threat Modeling Platform for Agentic-AI Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04785 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04785/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 14 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)
- LLM safety and security / [Prompt injection and agent security](https://mlsanity.com/safety/prompt-injection-and-agent-security/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Defending Against Alignment-Breaking Attacks via Robustly Aligned LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14348/) (2023)
- [Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations for LLM Conversation Safety: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09283/) (2024)
- [LLM as a Mastermind: A Survey of Strategic Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01230/) (2024)
- [Agentsway -- Software Development Methodology for AI Agents-based Teams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23664/) (2025)
- [Standardization of Psychiatric Diagnoses -- Role of Fine-tuned LLM Consortium and OpenAI-gpt-oss Reasoning LLM Enabled Decision Support System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25588/) (2025)
- [Proof-of-TBI -- Fine-Tuned Vision Language Model Consortium and OpenAI-o3 Reasoning LLM-Based Medical Diagnosis Support System for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18671/) (2025)
- [ThreatModeling-LLM: Automating Threat Modeling using Large Language Models for Banking System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17058/) (2024)
- [Model Context Contracts - MCP-Enabled Framework to Integrate LLMs With Blockchain Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19856/) (2025)
- [Auspex: Building Threat Modeling Tradecraft into an Artificial Intelligence-based Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09586/) (2025)
- [ADMIn: Attacks on Dataset, Model and Input. A Threat Model for AI Based Software](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07960/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [AI Trust OS -- A Continuous Governance Framework for Autonomous AI Observability and Zero-Trust Compliance in Enterprise Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04749/) (2026)
- [Toward Zero-Egress Psychiatric AI: On-Device LLM Deployment for Privacy-Preserving Mental Health Decision Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18302/) (2026)
- [Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19116/) (2026)
- [MindGap: A Conversational AI Framework for Upstream Neuroplastic Intervention in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14660/) (2026)
- [Human-AI Agent Interaction as a Neuroplastic Training Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12823/) (2026)
- [Trust propagation and structural containment in Multi-agent LLM pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17648/) (2026)
- [From Requirements to Attack Trees: Grounded LLM Agents for Design-Time Security Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03820/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.