Digs

Searching X architecture returns material written to be found by that query, which means tutorials and vendor pages. The material worth having was written by an engineer explaining a real system to their peers, and it uses different words. A dig is what comes back from going after that layer on one topic: the architecture reconstructed across real systems, the decisions and the conditions that flip them, what actually broke, and numbers you can plan against. Every claim is graded, linked and dated.

90 field guides 2433 graded sources 419 postmortems 8 categories

Authentication, authorisation, secrets, tenancy isolation and supply chain.

Security & Identity 10 Oct 2026

Rotate the key while nothing is wrong

Reconstructs trust-anchor rotation from the systems that do it on schedule (the DNS root, Entra ID, Sigstore, OpenSSH, Let's Encrypt) and the incidents where it was absent or late: Storm-0558's seven-year-old …

What surprised meMicrosoft stopped rotating MSA signing keys in 2021 because a manual rotation had caused a major outage; the fix for an availability incident left th…

34 sources · 30 organisations · 6 postmortems 34 min read
key-rotationtrust-anchorpkidnssecsigning-keys
Security & Identity 30 Sep 2026

Making a stolen session useless

A field guide to session and token theft, reconstructed from seven public incidents (Okta, Cloudflare x2, BeyondTrust, 1Password, GitHub, Meta, Storm-0558) and the standards now answering them (KEP-1205, DBSC,…

What surprised meThe controls teams reach for after a session theft, MFA, shorter lifetimes, rotation, do not change the one fact that made it work: the server cannot…

26 sources · 22 organisations · 9 postmortems 27 min read
session-managementtoken-theftauthenticationrevocationzero-trust
Security & Identity 28 Sep 2026

Letting humans into production

A field guide to the human-access plane: the three legitimate doors into production (automation, pre-validated tooling, audited break-glass), why none of the six investigated breaches defeated an approval gate…

What surprised meNot one of the six investigated breaches describes an approval gate being defeated; every one walked around the gates on a standing credential or a l…

27 sources · 23 organisations · 5 postmortems 32 min read
access-controlzero-standing-privilegejust-in-time-accessbreak-glassleast-privilege
Security & Identity 20 Sep 2026

When the secret leaks: the hour after exposure

A field guide to the race that starts when a token goes public: who is allowed to kill a credential automatically, how fast the machinery actually works, and why every incident in the corpus was reopened not b…

What surprised meRevocation, once aimed, worked in hours everywhere in the corpus; what reopened every incident was enumeration, the credential nobody listed, like th…

26 sources · 18 organisations · 7 postmortems 28 min read
secretscredential-rotationsupply-chainci-cdrevocation
Security & Identity 18 Sep 2026

The leak goes around the tenant filter, not through it

A field guide to tenant isolation built from seven published cross-tenant incidents (Steam 2015, Cloudbleed 2017, GitHub 2021, ChaosDB 2021, AutoWarp 2022, Atlassian 2022, ChatGPT 2023) and the placement desig…

What surprised meIn every published cross-tenant incident in this corpus the tenant-scoping layer worked exactly as designed; the data crossed tenants in a layer with…

27 sources · 25 organisations · 5 postmortems 31 min read
multi-tenancytenant-isolationrow-level-securitycachingblast-radius
Security & Identity 13 Sep 2026

The breach is a missing check. The outage is the checker.

Reconstructs the authorization layer from the accounts of Google, Airbnb, Carta, Netflix, Figma, Slack and Gojek: relationship tuples, precomputed indexes, caches with a consistency story, and the fail-open ch…

What surprised meThe paper's central contribution, consistency tokens against the new-enemy problem, is the least-copied part of the design: Ory Keto's zookie issue h…

26 sources · 24 organisations · 5 postmortems 29 min read
authorizationzanzibarrebacfail-openidor
Security & Identity 09 Sep 2026

Trusting the build pipeline

A CI job holds every credential you own and, on a public repo, runs code proposed by strangers. This guide reconstructs seven incidents (Codecov, CircleCI, Nx, tj-actions, Salesloft, Travis, PyTorch) into thre…

What surprised meNone of the seven incidents required breaking cryptography or a platform zero-day; each was a credential that should not have been reachable or code …

22 sources · 20 organisations · 7 postmortems 27 min read
ci-cdsupply-chainoidcsecretsgithub-actions
Security & Identity 29 Aug 2026

The renewal failed a month before anyone noticed

A field guide to the machine credential lifecycle, built from ten published incidents at Bazel, DigiCert, Microsoft, Let's Encrypt and Ericsson, the ballots and RFCs cutting public certificate lifetimes to 47 …

What surprised meCertificate lifetime is not the number that governs this failure. The number that governs it is the slack, the count of consecutive silent renewal fa…

22 sources · 17 organisations · 4 postmortems 44 min read
pkicertificatesacmerotationkubernetes