Publications

Research

What we measure while building and running our own platform. Two formats: research carrying its own evidence, and field notes from day-to-day operations. Every post states which one it is.

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Field note · 7 min read

Our failover had never worked, and every dashboard was green

A VRRP pair that never moved its floating IP for two months, and the two other controls we found lying the same day.

Research · 4 min read

CIS and Docker contradict each other, so decide in writing

CIS says disable IP forwarding. Docker depends on it. Applying the control breaks the platform; skipping it quietly makes the compliance report lie.

Field note · 4 min read

fail2ban locked us out of the whole estate, and it was right

An SSH agent holding several keys exhausts MaxAuthTries before offering the right one. Run in parallel, every node bans you at the same moment.

Field note · 5 min read

Our NAT gateway triggered a port scan alert in our own SOC

Docker quietly takes ownership of the FORWARD chain. After a reboot, our private nodes produced a slow port scan alert that was entirely correct.

Research · 5 min read

Escaping is not enough: the second decode inside an onclick

A correctly escaped value becomes executable again inside an onclick attribute. Three defects found in our back office, and why the CSP hid one of them.

Research · 8 min read

We audited our own website the way we audit a client's

Four findings on cyberaar.io, including TLS 1.0 still accepted at the edge and a playbook that reported success while doing nothing. Commands included.