Bought, not stolen
The malware that spent months wearing Microsoft’s trust didn’t steal a thing. No cracked certificate authority, no private key lifted off some breached vendor. There was, in effect, a shop: you uploaded your malware to a …
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Supply-Chain
The interpreter we forgot to sandbox
I write a CLAUDE.md for every project I work on, and a small pile of other markdown files besides. They’re how I keep an AI agent on the rails: what the project is, what the conventions are, what it must never do. I lean …
A signing key that never leaves KMS
The last post in this series walked through how a tool verifies a release signature the platform can’t forge. That post had a loose end dangling off the back of it, and I knew it the whole time I was writing. Because a …
Anything under an 8
I read the news about the National Vulnerability Database over a coffee that went cold while I sat there muttering at my phone. The short version: the NVD, the free public catalogue that quietly props up half the …
Nobody's coming to clean your supply chain
Pick a week in May 2026 and there’s a supply-chain attack in it. On the 11th someone owned TanStack’s CI and pushed 84 poisoned package versions in six minutes. On the 14th, three malicious versions of node-ipc, a …
A signing key needs somewhere to live
I left a door open a couple of posts ago, and it’s been quietly bothering me ever since. When I wrote about verifying your own downloads, I was honest that a checksum sitting next to the binary only catches accidents. …
Waivers with an expiry date
A vulnerability scanner gives you a yes or a no. Is there a known advisory on a path you actually use? Yes, or no. That’s genuinely useful, and you should run one. But it’s a snapshot, taken on the day you ask, and …
Verifying your own downloads: how I solved it for self-updating CLI tools
Way back in the introduction I promised I’d come back to the self-update integrity checks. Here we are. And the starting point is a slightly uncomfortable admission: for a good long while, go-tool-base’s update command …
OpenSSF Scorecard graded my supply chain
I turned OpenSSF Scorecard on expecting a pat on the head. go-tool-base is a security-minded project, I’m careful, surely the robot would agree. The robot did not agree. It handed back a report card with a fair bit of …
