Failure Pattern
Service meshes encrypt and route traffic but rely on metadata or certificates to determine identity. Attackers impersonate workloads inside the service meshes.
What We See in the Field
A compromised pod uses inherited certificates to communicate across the mesh. Sidecars treat the traffic as trusted. Mesh-level encryption hides malicious behavior.
Underlying Causes
Certificate reuse
Metadata-based policy decisions
Lack of hardware binding
Sidecar trust assumptions
Identity inherited from orchestrator
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL replaces mesh identity assumptions with immutable TrustKeys. Traffic inside the mesh is authenticated per workload. Impersonation becomes impossible.
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.