Sandeep Phanireddy is a cybersecurity professional with expertise in application and cloud security, penetration testing, and secure software development.
In today's digital environment, with AI entering digital spaces, traditional security measures like firewalls are no longer enough to defend applications, especially those that integrate AI-driven components. Sandeep Phanireddy, a security expert with experience in web and AI application protection, has focused on strengthening applications. Here, he shares some of his activities and insights with us.
Phanireddy's approach has consistently moved security considerations earlier into the development process. Over the years, he has supported security-by-design initiatives for modern web platforms and AI-integrated services. His work includes embedding dataflow-driven threat modeling directly into CI/CD pipelines and formalizing STRIDE- and MITRE-based assessment processes, ensuring that even AI microservices바카라”often overlooked in traditional security models바카라”are systematically evaluated for risks. He has also presented in cross-industry working groups focusing on developing secure LLM applications.
To ensure security, he integrated early threat modeling across a dozen cloud-native web applications. Phanireddy contributed to achieve a significant reduction, over 50%, in critical post-deployment vulnerabilities. His contributions also span into the world of AI applications, where he introduced custom threat taxonomies to cover risks unique to large language models (LLMs). These include model manipulation, training data leakage, and prompt injection attacks, all of which pose challenges that standard security frameworks were not originally designed to address.
Further, by integrating threat modeling into MLOps workflows, he and his team addressed high-risk flaws that could have led to compliance violations under HIPAA and GDPR. He also organized a cross-team threat modeling practice embedded into Agile sprints, with Quantitative Risk Scoring (DREAD + FAIR), which enabled prioritization of high-impact issues before pen-testing phases.
To continue with his activities, Phanireddy led secure design sprints for web applications built with React and Angular JS frameworks, particularly those connected to serverless APIs and AI inference engines. In this project, he focused on vulnerabilities like Insecure Direct Object References (IDOR), output boundary controls, and context-aware access policies. His work helped ensure that even as applications incorporated dynamic AI outputs, they maintained strong security postures against emerging threats.
He also built a reusable open-source scan framework for identifying and mitigating threats in AI-powered web apps, including scenarios for data poisoning, output injection, overreliance, and hallucination-based privilege escalation. He collaborated across teams to embed identity-aware proxy models and context-based access controls into apps handling dynamic LLM output, for real-time response and traceability. Further, he developed IaC-linked threat modeling pipelines using ThreatModeler API, integrated with Jira and Confluence for development visibility, so that issues can be easily identified and fixed.
What is the point of actions if they don바카라™t deliver results? His projects have delivered measurable outcomes. The methods used reduced AI-related exploit risk in production apps by implementing a combined approach of model input validation, output moderation, and prompt context fencing. Additionally, he designed a lightweight threat modeling checklist aligned with OWASP ASVS, significantly decreasing the time needed for modeling exercises in high-velocity development environments. He and his team also achieved a decrease in unresolved design-stage security issues by embedding AI-specific misuse scenarios into product architecture reviews.
However, adapting threat modeling to AI-native applications was not without its considerations. Phanireddy noticed that traditional frameworks like STRIDE were insufficient when assessing risks from nondeterministic AI behaviours, such as hallucinated outputs or adversarial prompt injections. To address this, he contributed to develop a hybrid framework blending STRIDE, DREAD scoring, and AI-specific misuse taxonomies drawn from resources like OpenAI's system cards and NIST's AI Risk Management Framework. This adaptation allowed his teams to identify and preempt vulnerabilities that would not have been flagged by conventional methods.
In addition to these technical strategies, Phanireddy addressed a organizational issue: demonstrating the return on investment of threat modeling to stakeholders. By quantifying risk reduction and illustrating time savings in security assessments, he built a strong case for making threat modeling an embedded, continuous practice within DevSecOps workflows.
Phanireddy's published works, including contributions such as "Threat Modeling in Web Application Security: A forward thinking to Secure Software Development, "which talks about how the understanding of threat modeling (anticipating the possible threats before they occur) and adhering to best practices can result in building stronger security systems.
Further talking about insights, he believes that to truly keep the applications secure in the modern environment, threat modeling must evolve beyond traditional system boundaries.
바카라śWe're now dealing with adaptive threats that leverage LLMs as an attack vector, not just as a tool. Future-proof threat models need to factor in prompt-as-code risks, RLHF bypassing attempts, synthetic data poisoning, and intentional misinterpretation of context바카라ť, he tells us.
He further adds, 바카라śGiven the context, secure design will increasingly need to be context-aware and user-aligned, with threat modeling tied to persona-driven misuse cases, especially as AI agents start handling decisions on behalf of users. Going forward, continuous and automated threat modeling 바카라” integrated directly into DevSecOps pipelines 바카라” will become the norm, not the exception.바카라ť
In Phanireddy's perspective, the companies that succeed in the current phase of application security will be the ones that recognize threat modeling as a discipline, not a one-time checklist. As apps become more interconnected, building security into every stage of development and threat modeling will be critical to maintaining trust and resilience in an evolving digital landscape.
About Sandeep Phanireddy
Sandeep Phanireddy is a cybersecurity professional with expertise in application and cloud security, penetration testing, and secure software development. He has conducted vulnerability assessments, simulated real-world attacks, and ensured compliance with standards like NIST 800-53, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
Skilled in offensive and defensive security, Sandeep works with tools like Burp Suite, Fortify, and Kali Linux and builds secure systems using Java, AWS, and Python. He collaborates with teams like DevOps teams to integrate security into CI/CD pipelines and monitoring tools like Jenkins and Splunk. He is focused on developing systems that are both high-performing and secure.