Research

In the previous post, we mapped 36 condition keys that the IAM engine evaluates but has never documented. The decomposition model, the service-specific resource identifiers, the organizational metadata - all of it sitting in the request context, invisible unless you probe for it. That post was about discovery. This one is about what you can…

This post was written in early August 2026, ahead of our fwd:cloudsec Europe talk. On August 25, AWS launched the Access Troubleshooter (currently in public preview), a first-party feature that surfaces the request context for denied requests. We've updated this post to account for it. When the IAM engine evaluates your request, it matches your…

Recap In Part I and Part II, we: Networking and VPC Mode Network Isolation Testing The microVM is assigned an IPv6 address matching the value in the JWT. Across multiple runs, all addresses shared the same 2600:1f18::/32 prefix, but cross-microVM communication always failed. We attempted to reach the host EC2 IMDS by manipulating the route…

Recap In Part I, we explored the AgentCore Runtime microVM from the inside and discovered we weren't alone - four platform binaries were running alongside our code, and one of them was quietly shipping logs to an AWS-internal S3 bucket. We left off with a question: what can we learn from these internal components, and…

Introduction When you deploy an AI agent to AWS Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, your code runs inside a Firecracker microVM - but it doesn't run alone. In this three-part series, we tear down the platform internals, document what we found, and assess how well the isolation holds up. Setting the Stage AWS Bedrock AgentCore Runtime is…

Key Takeaways Executive Summary arrayref 0.3.10 is a hijacked release of a widely used Rust utility crate that added one dependency, proc-macro1, whose build script downloaded and executed a remote binary at compile time. The release was live on crates.io for 86 minutes on August 20, 2026, alongside [email protected] and [email protected] published from the same…

Executive Summary  This stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in ArgoCD [versions <= 3.4.4] allows an attacker who can create or modify an Application to persist a malicious repoURL, which is subsequently executed in an administrator's browser within the Argo CD origin. Because the payload executes in the context of the administrator's authenticated session, and because…

Executive Summary Upwind recently observed multiple Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups actively exploiting CVE-2026-72898. This vulnerability - an unauthenticated SQL injection in the Metabase password reset endpoint carrying a critical CVSS score of 10.0, was actively exploited as a zero-day before a patch became available. An unauthenticated remote attacker can craft a malicious SQL injection…

Executive Summary On August 4, 2026 at 09:35 UTC, [email protected] was published to npm carrying a credential stealer, an npm worm, and a persistence mechanism designed to detonate during incident response.  Keyv ranks #274 by npm reach and is present in 84,759 customer environments, and the release shipped with valid GitHub OIDC provenance and a…

Executive Summary Upwind identified a critical supply chain compromise across five npm packages in the @asyncapi scope, published on July 14, 2026 via two separate branch compromises in two GitHub repositories. The attacker never touched an npm token. They abused each project's own CI pipeline through GitHub Actions OIDC to publish the malicious packages. The…

Executive Summary On June 17 2026, a coordinated supply chain attack pushed a malicious easy-day-js package into the dependency tree of the entire @mastra/* npm organization. Any npm install for a compromised @mastra/* package pulls [email protected], which runs a postinstall dropper, downloads a cross-platform RAT, installing persistent backdoors on macOS, Linux, and Windows.  The Mastra…

For most of the last decade, cloud security teams have lived by a simple slogan: encrypt everything. Encrypt at rest. Encrypt in transit. Use customer-managed keys. Rotate them. Pass the audit. Move on. That slogan just expired. In August 2024, NIST finalized the first three post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards and explicitly told organizations: start using…