Failure Pattern
As distributed architectures grow horizontally, identity assumptions break down. Attackers exploit the gaps to hide movement across regions and clusters.
What We See in the Field
Services in different zones communicate without verifying workload identity. Attackers breach one region and expand across the environment under trusted credentials.
Underlying Causes
Multi-zone trust assumptions
Certificates reused across clusters
Dynamic pods and nodes
Metadata-based routing
Lack of universal identity
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL provides a global cryptographic identity layer. Distributed systems verify identity consistently across clusters, clouds, and regions.
Broken Trust Assumption
The attacks that exposed this failure pattern were not stealthy break-ins. They were trusted operations.
During incidents such as SolarWinds, Capital One, and Okta, malicious activity was carried out using valid identities and approved execution paths. Certificates were valid. Tokens were accepted. Sessions were authenticated. From the system’s point of view, nothing appeared wrong.
This is the risk of trust inferred from credentials, location, or prior authentication.