Security-Critical Infrastructure
Systems where correctness and security are inseparable: hardening, compartmentalization, evidence, and operational guarantees.
Best starting points
Hybrid Schemes and Protocol Agility
Deep dive (April 2026): hybrid key establishment is a narrow hedge (HNDL), not “post-quantum TLS”. The hard part is suite identity, transcript binding, and AND-semantics for dual signatures.
Stateful Signatures Are a Distributed Systems Problem: XMSS/LMS Without Index Reuse
Deep dive (April 2026): stateful hash-based signatures look like “just PQC”, but one index reuse is a catastrophic key-management failure. Model the invariant, then build the allocator like a consensus component.
The Leaf Is the Hot Path: Signature Placement in Post-Quantum TLS (ML-DSA vs SLH-DSA)
Paper note (April 2026): experiments show SLH-DSA in the server leaf collapses TLS 1.3 handshakes by ~10^3×. PQ migration is a certificate-hierarchy and cost-concentration problem, not an algorithm swap.
Multi-Region Design: Failover That You Can Actually Test
Threat-model-first analysis (June 2022): Multi-Region Design: Failover That You Can Actually Test.
Kubernetes Hardening: RBAC, NetworkPolicy, and Pod Security
Threat-model-first analysis (May 2022): Kubernetes Hardening: RBAC, NetworkPolicy, and Pod Security.
Roadmap
- Security properties as first-class requirements
- Failure modes + degraded operation
- Observability for forensics (not dashboards)
- Rollback strategy + incident playbooks