defensive research

Defensive research

What defenders should do about what offensive research surfaces. Detection engineering, tool-output triage, and the structural gaps in AppSec programs — across the fifteen domains where mature programs are built.

Strategy & Metrics

Policy & Compliance

Education & Guidance

Threat Assessment

Security Requirements

Secure Architecture

Secure Build

Secure Deployment

Defect Management

Architecture Assessment

Req's-Driven Testing

Security Testing

Incident Management

Environment Mgmt.

Operational Mgmt.

Solving

What moves risk per dollar

Most AppSec investment goes into the domain that looked urgent last quarter, not the one that blocks the most attack paths. We study the tradeoffs — which detection controls actually reduce risk, and which are theater.

Solving

Measure what matters, ignore what doesn't

Most AppSec metrics are vanity numbers. We write about the handful that reflect program maturity — and why the rest of the dashboard is a distraction.

Emerging

Defending AI in production

Agent permissions, prompt-injection guardrails, and model-file validation are new names for old SAMM problems — threat modeling, secure build, operational monitoring. Our research maps the existing maturity model onto the AI attack surface: MLOps access boundaries, agent sandboxing, and detection patterns for tool-abuse in LLM applications.