Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill—
Sorry, wrong introduction. Let me sum up.
Hello. My name is David Kleiner. I am a systems security engineer in the Washington, DC area. I build and harden the infrastructure that research pipelines run on — Kubernetes, cloud platforms, detection pipelines. Of late I have become increasingly interested in, and concerned about, what happens when the workload doing the work is an autonomous agent. In deference to Ken Jennings: I, for one, find our new computer overlords quite concerning.
My journey to security did not start academically in computers systems or engineering, but in biochemistry, environmental toxicology, and academic research. That humble beginning, plus thirty years of real-world experience, is where the name of this site comes from. My early work looked at how even slight environmental changes drive dramatic selection pressure — how a dose that fails to kill selects for the organism that survives it. Security works the same way. A control that only partly works does not remove the threat; it selects for the threat that gets past it. Selection pressure is a driving force on biotic and abiotic systems alike.
What you will find here are notes from that work: things that broke, why they broke, what I learned, and what I wish I had learned sooner. I have always found myself at the far end of George Bernard Shaw’s line — “science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.” Those years have taught me never to stop asking questions, and never to stop refining how I ask them.
Everything herein is my own work on my own time and represents my own views. My own thoughts. As always: the story you are about to see is true; only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.