Failure Pattern
East west encryption hides malicious payloads and origin identity. Attackers exploit encryption to operate invisibly.
What We See in the Field
A compromised workload uses mutual TLS to communicate with downstream services. Tools see valid certificates and encrypted payloads. Attackers hide inside encrypted flows.
Underlying Causes
Blind trust in TLS
Certificate reuse
No per-workload verification
Encrypted channels inside mesh
Identity drift hidden by encryption
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL binds identity to encryption. Tools see the real identity for each session even when payloads remain encrypted.
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.