From Requirements to Attack Trees: Grounded LLM Agents for Design-Time Security Review

Akash Iyer, Taha Demirkan, Keerthi Koneru, Aaryan Siddharthan, Sheethal Kumar +1

Design-level security weaknesses can arise from requirements, trust assumptions, missing controls, and data flows before implementation begins. Existing security practices often identify these issues after code is written. We present a multi-agent LLM framework for design-time security analysis from product requirement documents and architecture diagrams. The proposed framework parses architecture diagrams into graph representations, generates misuse and failure cases, constructs attack trees, checks governance and compliance gaps, recommends mitigations, assigns enterprise security-domain tags, and produces a candidate revised architecture recommendation for expert review. The framework does not retrieve from Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) databases at inference time. Instead, it analyzes system behavior, trust boundaries, component interactions, and data-flow assumptions. Misuse cases act as intermediate representations that link findings to system components and attack paths, while a validation and refinement loop filters unsupported findings and improves grounding, traceability, and actionability. We evaluate the framework on a Microsoft reference-labeled threat-modeling…