Failure Pattern
Consensus and distributed locks depend on peer identity. Attackers impersonate nodes to corrupt consensus or lock mechanisms.
What We See in the Field
A compromised node participates in leader election or lock acquisition. Cluster coordination trusts it because certificates validate.
Underlying Causes
Peer trust assumptions
Certificate sharing
Metadata-based identity
No hardware-bound identity
Overprivileged internal cluster access
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL ensures each peer’s identity is cryptographically proven. Consensus accepts only workloads with valid TrustKeys, preventing impersonation.
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.