I was showing off a support assistant I’d wired up over the Model Context Protocol. Small thing: it could search our docs and open a doc by name. A teammate, being a teammate, pasted this into the chat pretending to…
Category: DZone Security Zone
The Rise of Agentic SRE: Humans, Agents, and Reliability
Site reliability engineering has always been about reducing toil, improving resilience and helping teams respond to incidents with speed and confidence. Agentic SRE takes this idea further, allowing AI systems to observe, reason, and act within operational workflows inside of…
Why AI-Generated Code Fails Security Reviews 45% of the Time
My friend is a junior developer, roughly eight months into her first real job. She said the most enjoyable thing about her week was watching Copilot complete all of her tasks before she would even type the closing bracket. In…
Refresh Token Rotation in Node.js: Stopping Token Theft Without Logging Users Out
JWT-based authentication is simple to start with and surprisingly hard to get right. The naive setup of a long-lived access token stored in the browser is a security liability. The textbook fixes short-lived access tokens plus a refresh token —…
Hardening MCP Gateways: Mitigating July 28 Security Risks in Java Applications
The upcoming release of the July 28 Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification is a massive milestone for AI integration. By shedding the baggage of stateful connections and embracing a streamlined, stateless HTTP paradigm, MCP has finally become enterprise-ready. Developers can…
Why Do Some Proxies Work Fine for Search But Fail Once You Start Filtering Results?
Automated web scraping, market intelligence data gathering, and large-scale search engine extraction platforms frequently hit an invisible wall. A collection of proxy IPs might execute initial search queries flawlessly, yielding a standard 200 OK status code and complete HTML payloads.…
Scaling Row-Level Security With ABAC on Databricks Unity Catalog
Onboarding a new table into row-level security should be four lines of metadata. Not two new objects, a code review, and a platform-team ticket. This post describes a tag-driven attribute-based access control (ABAC) pattern built on Databricks Unity Catalog primitives…
Security Is a Platform Property, Not a Pipeline Step
A few weeks ago, I disabled key authentication on an Azure storage account we used for Terraform state management. It was one of the key security recommendations in Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It made sense to use RBAC-only permissions, enforce…
Fix Circular Dependencies in PostgreSQL Row-Level Security With SECURITY DEFINER Functions
Row-level security in PostgreSQL is one of the more useful features for multi-tenant applications. The idea is straightforward: define a policy on a table that tells PostgreSQL which rows a given user is allowed to see or modify, and the…
The Agent Security Split: Tool Layer vs Sandbox Layer
When an enterprise asks, “Is your agent platform secure?”, the question is almost always a bundle of two distinct architectural concerns: Tool layer: Can the agent only call the tools we approved? Are the tool inputs and outputs validated? Are…
Every SOC Today Is Answering the Wrong Question
Ask most detection engineers what a SOC does, and they’ll say: it finds compromised machines. That’s the wrong question. Attackers stopped compromising machines as the primary objective years ago — machines are just where identities and trust relationships happen to…
Your Agent Trusts That Wiki. Should It?
We were building a DevOps agent to help with on-call remediation. The idea was straightforward: when an incident fires, the agent reads the relevant runbook from our internal wiki, assesses the situation, and executes the appropriate remediation steps. No waiting…
12 Factor Framework for Building Secure and Compliant Cloud Applications
It began with a late-night alert. A critical cloud application, serving thousands of users, had just been flagged for a security violation. No “hack” had occurred; nothing obviously was broken. What appeared to be a minor misconfiguration had quietly exposed…
Implementing Zero-Trust Networking and Identity for Microsoft Foundry Agents
Once your multi-agent system (Parts 6-8) is functionally solid, the question that comes up in every enterprise security review is the same: how do you know an agent is only doing what it’s authorized to do, over a network path…
Machine Identity Debt: Why Human Identity Is No Longer Cloud Security’s Primary Boundary
Cloud-native systems now create far more machine identities than human ones. Security strategies built around workforce identity are no longer sufficient. Here’s what engineering leaders should build instead. The Breach That Didn’t Need a Password On August 8, 2025, a…
Goodbye, Skeleton Keys: Why Machine Identity Broke IAM, and What SPIFFE Is Doing About It
Cloudflare published its own forensic timeline of the Salesloft Drift breach down to the minute, and it’s worth sitting with the detail for a second. At 11:51 on August 9, 2025, an actor researchers track as GRUB1 tried to validate…
AI Can’t Defend What It Can’t See
Most of what AI promises in security rides on something duller than the model itself: whether it can see the environment it’s defending. When it can’t, a stronger model doesn’t help. It makes the gaps harder to spot, and it…
Prompt Injection Attacks and Hidden Security Risks in LLM Applications
Where the Problem Sits Everyone talks about model safety. Not enough people talk about what happens when the input itself is the weapon. Prompt injection is not a niche edge case. It is the most direct way to compromise an…
Identity Was Never the Real Problem. Intent Is — and Almost Nobody Is Building For It Yet
Go back through every machine-identity breach from the past eighteen months and look for the one thing they all have in common. Not the attacker. Not the industry. Not even the dollar figure. Look for what happened at the authentication…
One Stolen Key, One Stolen Token: Why Machine Identity Is Cloud-Native’s Quietest Crisis — and the Only Fix That Actually Holds
On December 2, 2024, a security vendor called BeyondTrust noticed something wrong inside its own AWS account. By the time the investigation closed, the story that emerged was almost absurdly simple for something with this much fallout: an attacker —…