What a Raw Packet Taught Me About Trust

D
Dick Edidiong Bassey
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Early in my career I wrote a raw-socket intrusion detection daemon in C and watched raw network packets scroll in real time.

When you see what actually travels across a "trusted" network — malformed packets, spoofed headers, internal reconnaissance — the concept of a trusted network becomes a fiction.

Every system I have built since operates under one assumption: the network is hostile. The request might be hostile. Verify everything. Trust nothing by default. Log everything.

Design for breach and you will rarely be surprised by one.

— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2011