Security

The Rabbit Hole Generator gave me Macaron this week, Oracle’s open-source tool for checking software supply chain security. My first instinct was to file it next to every other dependency scanner I’ve used: point it at a package, get a list of CVEs back. That’s not what it does, and the gap between those two things turned out to be the actual point. A vulnerability scanner answers “does this package version have a known CVE.” Macaron answers a different question: “was this artifact actually built from the source code we think it was, by a process we can verify, with evidence that isn’t just the vendor’s word for it.” Those sound similar. They aren’t. A package can have zero known CVEs and still have no evidence at all connecting the file you pip installed to the GitHub repo everyone assumes it came from. ...

A signature on a piece of software proves someone with a key signed it. It doesn’t prove much about where that software actually came from: what source it was built from, what process built it, or whether anything happened to it between “code written” and “artifact shipped.” Provenance is the term for closing that gap: a verifiable record tying a specific commit, through a specific build process, to a specific output, in a way that’s checkable rather than just asserted. ...

Most incident response tooling forces a bad choice on you early in a case. Either you’re in a spreadsheet or a plain notebook with no structure, or you’re setting up a cloud platform with procurement friction, a rigid schema, and a data residency conversation before you’ve even confirmed the phishing email is real. Neither one matches the actual shape of early-stage IR work: messy notes, indicators that need pulling out and tracking, and relationships between them that you don’t know yet. ...

Most security monitoring tools rely on server-side logs or cloud-native telemetry. But what happens when the client is opaque? When a mobile app, a single-page application (SPA), or a proprietary service is behaving in ways the server doesn’t fully document, you need a way to look at the wire directly. This post also marks the beginning of a new experiment: The Rabbit Hole Series. Every Friday, a “Rabbit Hole Generator” I built (which I later took apart in its own post) spits out a new technical topic for me to explore for 30 minutes. This week, the generator gave me mitmproxy. ...

A Kubernetes Secret is not actually secret. That’s a hard sentence to sit with, especially if you’ve been dutifully creating Secret objects and patting yourself on the back for not hardcoding credentials in your ConfigMap. The problem runs deeper than most teams realize, and it doesn’t get fixed by following the basic Kubernetes documentation. This post is about what actually works, at different scales, with honest tradeoffs for each approach. ...