Forward-facing by design. The Basalt practice is structured around the attacker tradecraft that exists right now — not the threat models that comforted boards in 2022.
PILLAR 01
Agentic AI security
AI agents call tools, fetch data and act on instructions — and the attack surface is more like a software supply chain than a chatbot. We test tool-abuse, indirect prompt injection, agent escape and tool-chain confusion against production deployments.
Questions a Basalt operation will answer
- Which tools can the agent call and what state can it mutate?
- How is untrusted input separated from tool instructions?
- What is the blast radius when the agent is jailbroken — and how is it detected?
PILLAR 02
MCP and AI-tool supply chain
The Model Context Protocol exposes the same kind of trust assumptions that have burned software supply chains for years — but with less scrutiny. We assess MCP server configs, tool surfaces, sandboxing and version-pinning across your real agent stack.
Questions a Basalt operation will answer
- Which MCP servers are wired into your agents and where do they run?
- What does the trust boundary between MCP server and agent actually enforce?
- How are MCP server updates verified before they hit production agents?
PILLAR 03
Post-quantum cryptography readiness
Harvest-now-decrypt-later is not a future threat — it is happening now against long-life secrets and signed data. We inventory cryptographic use across your stack, score crypto-agility, and sequence migration to NIST PQC standards (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA).
Questions a Basalt operation will answer
- Where does cryptography live across your apps, infra and vendors?
- How long are your secrets and signed artefacts valuable to an attacker?
- How will you swap algorithms when (not if) one of them is broken?
PILLAR 04
Identity-first attack chains
Modern attackers do not break in — they log in. Identity is the new perimeter, and the attack chain runs through federated SaaS, OAuth grants, service principals and CI/CD identities. We model these paths end-to-end and engineer detections for the actual tradecraft.
Questions a Basalt operation will answer
- Which OAuth apps and service principals have standing access to your tenants?
- How would you detect a refresh-token theft or session-hijack today?
- What is the blast radius when one CI/CD identity is compromised?
PILLAR 05
Open-source supply chain (post-xz, post-tj-actions)
The xz backdoor and tj-actions compromise made the abstract concrete: open-source maintainership is a target. We assess your software supply chain controls, SBOM hygiene, signed-artefact verification and CI/CD trust boundaries against the threats that actually shipped this year.
Questions a Basalt operation will answer
- What stops a malicious update from a single dependency reaching production?
- Are your CI/CD secrets scoped, rotated and observed?
- Do you verify build provenance, or just trust the registry?