Aviatrix Presents at Security Field Day 16

Aviatrix Contain the Blast Radius Without Breaking the App

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Chris McHenry of Aviatrix demonstrates how the Cloud Native Security Fabric contains a compromised cloud workload without disrupting applications. The session walks through Aviatrix’s see, insert, enforce, and operate approach, covering agentless gateway insertion, monitor-mode policy simulation, smart groups spanning VMs, Kubernetes, and serverless, policy as code, and the new Active Defense agentic layer for automating zero trust. The demo was part of Aviatrix’s Security Field Day 16 presentation with Willie Tejada and Matt Snyder, which framed blast radius as the measure of how much damage a compromised system can do.

McHenry argued that cloud network security is the worst he has seen in twenty years. More than 95% of the default cloud controls Aviatrix has examined across hundreds of containment assessments allow unfettered internet access, and roughly 2% of AWS spend goes to NAT gateways that provide unprotected egress. The live demo began with a compromised serverless workload on ECS that could reach command-and-control hosts, a rogue DNS server, GitHub, and a neighboring file share. McHenry deployed Aviatrix’s eBPF-based gateways from the egress score, replaced the NAT gateway, and enabled transparent inspection on a transit gateway. Route tables updated automatically, and throughput dipped only from about 9.2 Gbps to the high eights. Rules simulated in monitor mode then moved to enforcement, cutting off command and control and lateral movement, while one intent-based policy generated more than 50 security group rules to close the local segment.

The larger point was that fear of breaking applications, not a lack of tools, keeps teams from containing breaches. Aviatrix therefore favors a ladder that starts with blocking known-bad traffic rather than all-or-nothing zero trust. McHenry said basic malicious-egress filtering alone would have stopped both LiteLLM supply chain compromises this year. Smart groups that tracked a Kubernetes deployment as it scaled to ten pods, along with policy that Kubernetes teams edit through their own pipelines, are meant to keep security out of developers’ way. Active Defense is in early access now, with general availability expected later this year. It uses AI to map business criticality and move segments from learning to enforcement. It is backed by workload-specific threat intelligence that would allow YouTube on desktops but flag it in a payment environment.

Personnel: Chris McHenry

Aviatrix Blast Radius Economics – Pricing What a Compromise Can Reach

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Willie Tejada of Aviatrix introduces Blast Radius Economics, an open framework for pricing what a single compromised system can reach. The session explains reachable value at risk, built from system value, reachable share, probability, and time to contain, and positions it alongside CVE-based patching metrics and FAIR as a board-level number for justifying containment budgets. Presented at Security Field Day 16, the segment moved from Chris McHenry’s containment demo to the financial side, setting up Matt Snyder’s discussion of the framework’s companion metric.

Tejada argued that security leaders track well-understood numbers each quarter, but nothing has put a value on what a breach can actually reach. Many CISOs are working from budgets set in 2025 while the threat landscape has shifted sharply, and time to patch can no longer stand alone as a hygiene metric. Reachable value at risk combines the CFO’s valuation of a system, the share of the environment one compromised machine can reach, the probability of compromise, and the time to contain it. Because system value and probability are debatable, Tejada noted they largely cancel out when comparing before and after, leaving reach and time to contain as the variables that matter. Reach is where organizations are most often surprised, since the footprint drawn on a whiteboard rarely matches what inventory shows a workload can touch. Using the MGM breach as an example, he described how cutting reach from 60% of an environment to 10% would sharply reduce the value at risk.

Tejada presented the framework as open to any vendor with a containment system, not just Aviatrix, and as a complement to FAIR that strengthens its magnitude inputs rather than replacing it. The goal is to give each role its own number. The CISO would own blast radius and the cost of reducing it, and the CIO would own the architecture changes that shrink it. The investment case would rest on the work product measured by durable risk reduction, the counterpart Snyder would cover. The board, in turn, would watch CVE exposure and reachable value at risk side by side, expecting both to fall quarter over quarter. That pairing gives containment a defensible line in 2027 budget discussions with the CFO.

Personnel: Willie Tejada

Aviatrix We Scored Our Own Security Plan – Here’s What Changed

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Matt Snyder of Aviatrix presents durable risk reduction, a scoring model that ranks security work by how much it shrinks an attacker’s reach and how long it holds up, weighed against effort, technical debt, and cost. He shares results from scoring Aviatrix’s own Q3 security plan with an AI agent and the planning commitments that followed, then joins a closing Q&A on the framework. The session closed Aviatrix’s Security Field Day 16 presentation, with Willie Tejada and Chris McHenry joining the discussion.

Snyder argued that AI has collapsed the pyramid of pain, since changing tactics or tools is now just a matter of compute. Attacks can now move from initial access to full ransomware in under an hour, while defenders still work in 12-to-18-month planning cycles. He contrasted “sandcastles,” projects that sound impressive but wash away as attackers iterate, with “seawalls” that keep holding. The model assumes roughly a three-year shelf life for tools and processes. Replacing standing admin rights with just-in-time access scored highest, while a new SIEM correlation rule scored just 0.05. Snyder built an agent that scored about 30 Jira items five times and averaged the results before he reviewed them. Only three items qualified as seawalls, and the bottom twelve were sandcastles. Snyder also argued that decisions not to act, such as leaving a fragile application unpatched, should be scored too.

The results changed the plan: hardening comes first, and no new tools come in unless they solve a hardening problem. Every detection needs an automated response and a link to a preventive control, and rules that can’t justify their upkeep get cut. Snyder cautioned that scores can be inflated, can favor what sells, and have sometimes been wrong, so teams should debate them rather than accept the agent’s output. He shared the agent and scoring framework on GitHub. In Q&A, Tejada explained that each system’s value is set by the enterprise, sometimes taken from cyber insurance figures. A delegate called CVE-based risk reactive and nearly worthless in a post-Mythos world, and praised the model for serving both the CISO’s board reporting and practitioners’ prioritization. Tejada countered that patching still matters, since containment buys the time to do it right.

Personnel: Matt Snyder