Failure Pattern
Cloud networking means making decisions based on tags, labels, and IPs. Attackers manipulate metadata to blend in.
What We See in the Field
A compromised VM adopts labels from a legitimate workload. Routing, security groups, and API policies treat the attacker as trusted. Internal exposure increases rapidly.
Underlying Causes
Metadata-driven trust
Dynamic infrastructure causing identity drift
Orchestrators inheriting identity across clones
Lack of hardware binding
Blind reliance on ephemeral attributes
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL enforces immutable identity at the workload level. Metadata cannot override cryptographic trust. Cloud networking policies operate on real identity instead of labels.
Broken Trust Assumption
This failure pattern has played out repeatedly in real security incidents—not because of missing tools, but because of how trust is assigned.
In breaches such as SolarWinds, Capital One, Okta, and MOVEit, attackers did not bypass security controls. They operated through them, using valid identities, trusted credentials, signed code, and encrypted sessions. Security systems accepted these signals as proof of legitimacy, allowing malicious behavior to proceed.
The common thread across these incidents is structural: identity was assumed based on trust signals, not proven at the moment of execution.