Category: Misc

Misc
by Enno Rey

When paradigms are shifting: InfoSec in the age of AI

Over the last few weeks, I have had a very productive exchange with Christoph Klaassen on the impact of AI on security governance and compliance. In this post, we summarize our thoughts.

When the Perimeter Dissolves: InfoSec in the Age of Agentic AI

There’s an old saying among hackers coined by Dr. Eugene Spafford: “The only truly secure system is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards – and even then I have my doubts.”1

It was a joke, a wry nod to the impossibility of perfect security. But here’s the thing: the joke doesn’t land anymore. Because in the world we’re building right now, the systems don’t stay powered off. They reason. They plan. They act. And they do it faster than any human security team can keep up.

Welcome to the age of agentic AI. If you work in Information Security Management and/or Governance, Risk & Compliance, this is the inflection point you may have been sensing in your gut for months.

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Misc
by Tillmann Oßwald

Windows Early Boot Configuration: The CmControlVector and PspSystemMitigationOptions

While investigating how process mitigation settings are initialized, I encountered the global variable PspSystemMitigationOptions. Tracing how this value is populated led me to the CmControlVector. In this blog post, we take a look at the Windows kernel land configuration manager, especially its global CmControlVector variable. Quick note: the kernel’s configuration manager is not related to Microsoft Intune’s Configuration Manager. In short, the configuration manager is responsible for managing and implementing the registry. However, it is also responsible for setting up parts of the system during early boot.

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Misc
by Lorin Lehawany

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026

Exactly one week ago, Sven and I had the incredible opportunity to give our very first talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026: How To Break Multi-Tenancy Again and Again …and What We Can Learn From It. We discussed the challenges of namespace-based multi-tenancy and presented real-world exploits in Kubeflow, Istio, and Traefik that bypass threat boundaries between namespaces and workloads. Based on these problems, we developed a methodology to assess and address them. You can find the methodology discussed in the talk in detail in another blog post or on GitHub. You can also find the slides here.

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Misc
by Sven Nobis

Methodology for Assessing Kubernetes Namespace-Based Multi-Tenancy Setups

This page introduces our structured methodology for assessing security risks in Kubernetes environments that use Namespace-based Multi-Tenancy. It addresses weaknesses that break Namespace-based isolation that not well studied, yet. We found this issues during our research and presented them together with this methodology in our Talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026.

The methodology assumes that industry best practices, such as NetworkPolicies, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Pod Security Standards, are already in place. These measures provide a necessary baseline level of protection against well-known isolation threats. However, they are insufficient to address a class of more subtle attack vectors arising from interactions between tenants and shared components. Such attack vectors may still compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA) of the cluster and its workloads, even in well-hardened environments.

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Misc
by Lorin Lehawany

Security Considerations on Istio’s CRDs with Namespace-based Multi-Tenancy

We reported a possible Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack scenario in which a VirtualService can redirect or intercept traffic within the service mesh. This affects Namespace-based Multi-Tenancy clusters where tenants have the permissions to deploy Istio resources (networking.istio.io/v1).

In collaboration with Istio, we published a guest submission in Istio’s blog (as well as below), a Security Bulletin, and an update to their Security Model to address this issue.

This blog post highlights the risks of using Istio in multi-tenant clusters and explains how users can mitigate these risks and safely operate Istio in their deployments.

Please note that the issues even extend beyond the cluster scope in a “single mesh with multiple clusters” deployment.

The behavior described in this post applies to Istio version 1.29.0 and to all versions since the introduction of the mesh gateway option in the VirtualService resource.

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Misc
by Gregor Debus

Assessing Endpoint Protection: Our Approach to EDR/XDR and Supplements Evaluation

There is a growing landscape of security products promising to protect an organization’s IT infrastructure from attacks. Solutions referred to as EDR, and sometimes also as XDR, are designed to protect endpoints from all malicious activity. The ever-increasing cases of breaches and the associated costs, especially in the realm of ransomware attacks, raise the question of whether there is more that can be done to add an additional layer to traditional endpoint protection concepts. That is why a customer of ours commissioned us to evaluate whether EDR supplementing solutions provide extended protection against ever-evolving threats, as well as to shine a light on the performance overheads those solutions might introduce.

This blog post describes the methodology we use to evaluate and compare different EDR solutions for our customers. Given the growing number of sophisticated attacks, it is important not only to look at detection rates in isolation but to assess how these solutions perform under realistic conditions.

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Misc
by Florian Bausch

Incident Response in GCP: Out of Scope – Out of Mind

We are regularly offering a GCP Incident Response and Analysis training. In this training, we analyze resources in GCP cloud together with our trainees that were successfully compromised by attackers, e.g., GCE instances and Cloud Build projects. Therefore, we need tooling that quickly detects misconfiguration of resources that helped the attacker during the compromise. During the analysis of different tools and different kinds of misconfiguration we realized that GCE instance access scopes are a blind spot of many (in fact all that we tested) security audit tools. In this blog post, we want to elaborate on the problems that arise from this behavior.

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Misc
by Dennis Heinze

Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha RACE Vulnerabilities

About six months ago we released a security advisory on this blog about vulnerabilities in Airoha-based Bluetooth headphones and earbuds. Back then, we didn’t release all technical details to give vendors more time to release updates and users time to patch their devices. Around the time of the initial partial disclosure in the beginning of June, Airoha put out an SDK release for their customers that mitigates the vulnerabilities. Now, half a year later, we finally want to publish the technical details and release a tool for researchers and users to continue researching and check whether their devices are vulnerable.

This blog post is about CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, and CVE-2025-20702.

Alongside this blog post, we also released a white paper. It contains some more technical details, as well as information on how to check whether your device might be affected.

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Misc
by Tillmann Oßwald

Windows Hello for Business – Past and Present Attacks

Windows Hello for Business is a key component of Microsoft’s passwordless authentication strategy. It enables user authentication not only during system sign-in but also in conjunction with new and advanced features such as Personal Data Encryption, Administrator Protection, and Recall. Rather than depending on traditional passwords, Windows Hello leverages a PIN or biometric methods – such as fingerprint or facial recognition – to unlock cryptographic keys protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

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