KevinBytes

Writing

Research and field notes

Deep dives, threat analysis, and notes from the work - mostly on AI and agent security, sometimes on whatever is breaking this week.

Start here

A few ways into the research, depending on what you’re working on.

AI and agent security

Follow the data, permissions, and evidence behind an agent system.

  1. How to Evaluate Tools for Securing Production AI Agents

    Start with a practical method for evaluating agent security.

  2. Choosing an AI Agent Memory Service: Security and Performance Tradeoffs

    Examine memory, tenant boundaries, and deletion with a local experiment.

  3. Tamper-Evident AI Agent Logs: Integrity, Gaps, and Limits

    Test what an audit trail can prove and where it loses evidence.

Detection and threat research

Turn a detection claim into a repeatable exercise and an analyst question.

  1. A Repeatable Threat-Hunting Exercise for Small Security Teams

    Run an identity hunt against synthetic records and negative cases.

  2. Evaluating Identity Detection Coverage Across MSP Tenants

    Check identity coverage and tenant separation before relying on an alert.

Security architecture

Make system boundaries, assumptions, and design decisions easier to review.

  1. Using C4 Diagrams In Security Work

    Use diagrams to explain trust boundaries and data flows.

  2. Zero Trust Without The Vendor Fog

    Connect Zero Trust principles to implementation decisions.

  3. 4+1 Architecture Views For Security Reviews

    Choose the views that answer a security reviewer’s questions.

Latest

A Repeatable Threat-Hunting Exercise for Small Security Teams

A local identity hunt with synthetic records, executable SQL, negative cases, and explicit blind spots.

September 9, 20264 min readDetection Engineering
September 9, 20265 min read

Choosing an AI Agent Memory Service: Security and Performance Tradeoffs

A memory-service decision method with a small local SQLite experiment, tenant checks, deletion limits, and latency measurements.

AI AgentsMemoryTenancy
September 9, 20264 min read

Evaluating Identity Detection Coverage Across MSP Tenants

A bounded Microsoft Entra evaluation method, with synthetic cases for correlation and tenant separation.

Microsoft EntraIdentityMSP
September 9, 20265 min read

How to Evaluate Tools for Securing Production AI Agents

An evaluation method that follows identity, authority, approval, and failure behavior through a real agent workflow.

AI AgentsSecurity ArchitectureEvaluation
September 9, 20265 min read

Tamper-Evident AI Agent Logs: Integrity, Gaps, and Limits

A runnable local log-chain experiment covering edits, deletion, replay, truncation, drops, restarts, and signer compromise.

AI AgentsLoggingIntegrity
September 9, 20264 min read

What AI Agent Assurance Claims Actually Cover

How to read an agent assurance claim through its scope, assessor, test version, and renewal conditions.

AI AgentsAssuranceAccess Control
June 3, 20264 min read

InfluenceChat: What Failed While Building A Manipulation Dataset

A research note on why real manipulative assistance requests were much harder to retrieve from public LLM logs than expected.

AI Safety Research
January 18, 20264 min read

AI Safety in Industrial Control Systems

A hypothetical laboratory boundary case showing where AI recommendations, human authorization, and independent safety controls belong.

Industrial Security
January 17, 20263 min read

What Destructive Chip Inspection Can Tell You

What destructive chip inspection can answer, and why opening the package is only one part of hardware verification.

Hardware Security
January 9, 20263 min read

Inside The /ghs Label Builder

Why I built a browser label tool, how its canvas workflow is structured, and where review still belongs.

Tools
December 15, 20253 min read

December 2025 Site Notes

A short update on the site, privacy language, and the kind of work I am taking on.

Updates
January 17, 20254 min read

Zero Trust Without The Vendor Fog

A practical reading of NIST SP 800-207 and the parts of Zero Trust that matter during implementation.

Cybersecurity
January 15, 20255 min read

Home Lab Foundations

A Proxmox-based starting layout, with separate management access, disposable test networks, and a restore test before the next hardware purchase.

Home Lab
July 2, 20215 min read

TOGAF And Zachman For Security Architecture

Using contractor access to separate TOGAF's method for changing architecture from Zachman's way of organizing its description.

TOGAFZachman FrameworkEnterprise Architecture
June 15, 20214 min read

Using C4 Diagrams In Security Work

A practical way to use C4 diagrams for trust boundaries, data flows, and incident response.

C4 ModelArchitecture DiagramsCybersecurity
May 20, 20214 min read

4+1 Architecture Views For Security Reviews

How the 4+1 view model can keep security architecture from collapsing into one overloaded diagram.

4+1 ArchitectureKruchtenSystem Architecture