Hot take: Most “secure” cloud deployments are just expensive theater. You’ve got firewalls, access controls, endpoint protection - but what if someone compromises your bootloader before any of that even starts? This isn’t theoretical. Real attackers are targeting the boot process, hypervisors, and kernel-level compromises that happen before your security stack loads. Your fancy SIEM won’t help if the system reporting to it has been compromised from day one. The Trust Problem No One Talks About Here’s what keeps me up at night: How do you trust a system you can’t physically touch?

If you’re running microservices in production, you’ve probably hit this wall: how do services actually authenticate to each other? The old approach of “throw everything behind a firewall and call it secure” doesn’t work when your services are scattered across multiple clouds, spinning up and down constantly, and talking to each other over networks you don’t fully control. Most teams end up with some combination of: API keys stuffed into environment variables Certificates that someone manually rotates (when they remember) Service accounts with way too many permissions That one shared secret that’s been in the codebase since 2019 SPIFFE is designed to solve this mess.

TLDR: AI model files can execute malicious code when loaded, turning your ML pipeline into an attack vector. Security researcher Cyrus Parzian demonstrated at DEF CON 33 how popular AI frameworks blindly execute code embedded in model files. This isn’t about sophisticated exploits - it’s about the fundamental design of AI model formats that prioritize convenience over security. Essential reading for DevOps, ML engineers, and security architects deploying AI systems.

TLDR: Researchers discovered that a simple weather app can steal your banking data through AI assistants. The attack requires only basic coding skills - not elite hacking. This post explains how these “Trivial Trojans” work and how to protect yourself. Essential reading for anyone using AI tools with personal data. The Threat: A Real Scenario You install a weather app for your AI assistant. You also have a banking app connected.

Authentication What is authentication? It is the process by which we let a user prove to the application their identity. This is commonly done by means of a username and password. Username is the identifier that represents the user in the application. Most applications today follow what is called the OpenID Connect authentication flow. This is defined by the OpenID Foundation and is a derivation of the OAuth 2.0 specification.

As with any program or language that I have ever learned, it all starts with Hello, world. In the past, I wrote extensively on Blogger, using a multitude of subdomains, each for a different category of thoughts and ideas. However, this site is a rebirth of my earlier Blogger site with a similar name. I have moved on to far different things than what I used to blog about, so a different platform seems appropriate.