Topics / Defend Systems / Security Architecture
Security Architecture
Design defensible systems and resilience patterns.
Intended audience: Beginners, practitioners, and security engineers relevant to this discipline.
3 results
Designing Fail-Closed Security Automation
Why security automation drifts toward fail-open by default — uncaught exceptions, permissive branches, leftover bypasses, and timeouts that assume the safe outcome — and how to design a control that fails closed by construction: explicit allow-lists, treating 'cannot determine' as its own denying outcome, and a deliberate circuit breaker for the controls where fail-closed itself is the greater risk.
A Backup Is Not Proven Until It Is Restored
A checklist for verifying that a backup is actually recoverable — distinguishing a backup job's success signal from demonstrated restoration into an isolated environment, with fictional examples throughout.
Logs Are Not Proof: Verifying Automated Actions
A guide to verifying that an automated security action — a firewall-rule deployment, an access revocation, a patch rollout, a quarantine action — actually produced its intended effect, distinguishing a completion signal (exit code, log entry, dashboard status) from independently verified evidence, with fictional examples throughout.
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