Failure Pattern
Server monitoring tools assume workload identity remains consistent. Identity drift leads to misattribution and hidden attacker actions.
What We See in the Field
Two workloads appear identical because they share certificates. Logs assign actions to the wrong system. Attackers leverage identity drift to perform malicious actions under legitimate names.
Underlying Causes
Certificates carried across cloned workloads
Missing hardware-bound identity
Lack of workload fingerprinting
Monitoring tools using metadata for identification
Drift common in dynamic cloud environments
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL assigns immutable TrustKeys that do not drift. Monitoring tools receive accurate identity tied to the specific system generating traffic.
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.