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Technical notes & releases.

Detection engineering writeups, architecture decisions, and what shipped — written by the person building it, not a marketing team.

2026-08-07 · Architecture

Kafka is optional: designing for graceful degradation

Not every self-hosted deployment wants to run a Kafka cluster. Here's how XCloak treats it as an enhancement rather than a hard dependency, and where that tradeoff actually lives in the code.

2026-07-31 · Engineering

Why every destructive SOAR action needs a human click

Playbooks can isolate a host or kill a process automatically — except they can't, not without someone approving it first. Here's the design behind that gate, and why it's not configurable.

2026-07-24 · Security

Multi-tenancy and row-level security: what an internal audit found

A defense-in-depth layer we built but hadn't fully wired up — how we found it, why it mattered, and what changed.

2026-07-17 · Engineering

Why we built our own Sigma engine

Sigma is a spec, not a library. Here's what we implemented, what we deliberately left out, and why field-level matching plus logsource pre-filtering was the right subset to start with.

2026-07-10 · Architecture

How a log line becomes an alert

The full pipeline from agent telemetry to a dashboard notification — normalization, Sigma evaluation, correlation, and real-time delivery.

2026-07-11 · Detection · Firewall

Enterprise Firewall + Deep Packet Inspection

How the firewall went from a basic rule list to an enterprise policy engine — and how four new DPI detectors add multi-layer L7 visibility: DGA scoring, TLS anomalies, HTTP inspection, and protocol tunneling.

2026-07-07 · Release

XCloak v0.2.0: Enterprise Security Hardening

v0.2.0 is the most significant XCloak release to date — httpOnly cookie auth, atomic rate limiting, PostgreSQL RLS now load-bearing, and Kafka wired end-to-end.

2026-07-06 · Engineering

Building Enterprise Android MDM Without Google EMM

A Flutter foreground service that collects security telemetry and accepts management commands without requiring EMM enrollment or Device Owner mode.

2026-07-05 · Engineering

How XCloak Maps Linux /proc/net to Process Names

What process owns this network connection? On Linux the answer lives in /proc — the inode bridge from socket table to PID to process name.

2026-07-03 · Security

Closing the TOCTOU Gap in Redis Rate Limiting

Rate limiters look simple but contain a subtle concurrency trap. Here's how we found it and closed it with an atomic Lua script.

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