No-Slop Research & Human Thoughts on Security

No-Slop Research & Human Thoughts on Security

Latest — 01 Sep 2026

The Docs Say It's OK: When Documentation Replaces a Fix in Vertex AI

What if the fix for a privilege-escalation bug were a sentence in the docs? Not a patched code path, not the missing check but a note on a reference page. That's not hypothetical. It's what Google shipped for two new privilege escalation paths in Vertex

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The Two Mitigations for the Service-Account Confused Deputy in the Cloud

A confused deputy is nothing more than a privileged intermediary tricked into acting for a caller who lacks the authority itself. In the cloud, it has two distinct flavors, one leveraging a non-human identity (NHI) owned by you, the customer, and one leveraging a non-human identity (NHI) owned

An Optimistic Nihilist's View of the Vuln-apocalypse

Congratulations, everybody—we might be entering the outer bands of the Vuln-apocalypse storm. The traditional, polite security timeline where we had weeks to patch a vulnerability is dead, replaced by a hyper-accelerated, AI-fueled reality where the time to exploitation is essentially zero. Those massive, "keystone"

Can we afford to get lost anymore? Can we afford not to?

I remember life before phones and Google Maps. Even before MapQuest, we all used to get lost a lot more. Back then, I’d stop at random gas stations to ask for directions, and my knowledge of highways, city streets, and far-flung roadways was actually pretty decent. But of

The San Francisco Consensus

Last week at the [un]prompted conference in San Francisco, the question on everyone's mind was: What happens when Time-to-Exploit reaches zero? The Problem, As Told By The Clock The Zero Day clock project shows a single, collapsing trendline. In 2018, the median time between a

You are the Blackboard - AI Agent Assisted Bug Hunting

In vulnerability and CVE hunting, you have a search space problem. Your attack surface is seemingly unlimited, so much so that target selection is often considered the most important skill of a bug bounty hunter. In this article, I'll recount the process I used to narrow the search

GCP IAM 201 - OAuth Scopes

In the OAuth 2.0 specification, a scope defines the limits of an access token. When applied to Google APIs, a scope specifies which APIs and resources the token can access. If you only take away one thing about OAuth 2.0 Scopes for Google APIs, it is: do not

Working as Intended - The Unauditable, Unmanageable Keys in Google Cloud

This blog outlines three vulnerabilities with user-associated HMAC keys in Google Cloud. Vulnerability #1 - Insufficient Logging Vulnerability #2 - Unmanagable Long-Term Credentials Vulnerability #3 - Unauditable Long-Term Credentials TLDR; * HMAC keys serve a practical purpose. They can be used to create Sigv4 signed headers used to authenticate against the

GCP IAM 201 - Service Agents | What Can Go Wrong

This post aims to answer the question, 'What can go wrong when using Google Cloud services that leverage Service Agents/P4SAs?' For an introduction to Service Agents, see GCP IAM 201 - Service Agents. Below, you'll find an overview of possible threats to Google Cloud customers due

GCP IAM 201 - Service Agents

Service Agents are nothing more than a type of a Service Account. Also known as a P4SA (Per-Project, Per-Product; Service Account), a Service Agent is typically created automatically whenever its associated Google API is enabled in a Project. Service Agent and Service Account Comparison Customer-managed SAs Google-

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No-Slop Research & Human Thoughts on Security

Thoughts, stories and ideas from a human in cloud and identity security research.

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