RC RANDOM CHAOS

Articles

Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.

No one hacked the NSA
supply-chain-securitythird-party-risk

No one hacked the NSA

The NSA's Mythos access loss wasn't a breach - it was a control-plane revocation by a third party. A supply chain availability failure with no patch.

7 min read
Saying you built it proves nothing
access controlidentity verification

Saying you built it proves nothing

A contested 'vibe code' claim shows why self-reported origin accepted without verification is an unenforced control, not a trust boundary.

7 min read
The collector frees live objects
garbage collectionuse-after-free

The collector frees live objects

Garbage collection bugs are use-after-free in the runtime. How tricolour invariants, write barriers, and moving collectors break, and why EDR misses it.

7 min read
Two thousand keys against one lock
identity validationbrute force attack

Two thousand keys against one lock

A coordinated brute-force of 2,000 attempts against one AI assistant's credential path shows weak identity validation is a systemic boundary failure.

6 min read
Cloudflare's self-managed OAuth secures nothing by default
oauthaccess control

Cloudflare's self-managed OAuth secures nothing by default

Cloudflare's self-managed OAuth moves the enforcement point from provider to user. An unconfigured access control is an open path, not a safe default.

6 min read
CVE-2009-1897 is back, now under every @bitCast
memory-safetyllvm

CVE-2009-1897 is back, now under every @bitCast

How Zig's @bitCast lowering and LLVM's optimizer can synthesize exploitable use-after-free bugs that no source review or EDR will ever see.

6 min read
Every model behind an API is already leaking
LLM securityAI system architecture

Every model behind an API is already leaking

Anthropic's Alibaba extraction claim isn't a model failure, it's architecture. The API boundary was never a security guarantee, and designing it is your job.

10 min read
Governments collect populations, not threats
mass surveillanceoperational security

Governments collect populations, not threats

Mass surveillance is default-on collection plus retention. The unwatched baseline is gone. Operate as already collected and limit what the record resolves.

8 min read
LuaJIT proposal exposes a guard-elision primitive
luajittype-confusion

LuaJIT proposal exposes a guard-elision primitive

LuaJIT's proposed relaxed type checking elides JIT trace guards, creating a type-confusion primitive reachable wherever embedded Lua handles untrusted input.

7 min read
Telemetry is the breach
telemetry securitydata leak

Telemetry is the breach

Meta paused an employee-tracking telemetry program after a data leak. The real finding is embedded in-process instrumentation as a structural attack surface.

7 min read
The device is the inventory
residential proxiessupply chain

The device is the inventory

Smart TV apps embed residential proxy SDKs that turn devices into exit nodes. The trust failure lives in the build pipeline, not the hardware.

6 min read
They walked out with the blueprints, not answers
trust boundariesaccess control

They walked out with the blueprints, not answers

Anthropic alleges Alibaba extracted Claude capabilities. The confirmed issue is structural: authenticated access governs entry, not what a party accumulates.

7 min read