Case Studies
Selected engagements demonstrating our approach to offensive security testing and risk assessment.
Authorization Bypass in Multi-Tenant SaaS Application
Client: B2B SaaS company, 50K+ enterprise users
Challenge: Client required penetration testing prior to SOC 2 Type II audit. The application had complex role-based access controls across multiple tenant organizations.
Approach: We conducted white-box API testing with focus on authorization logic, tenant isolation, and privilege escalation paths. Testing included manipulation of API parameters, JWT token analysis, and role boundary testing.
Key Finding: Identified a critical authorization flaw allowing users to access resources across tenant boundaries by manipulating organization IDs in API requests. The vulnerability existed in 12 API endpoints handling sensitive customer data.
Impact: Complete tenant isolation failure. Any authenticated user could potentially access data belonging to other organizations by iterating organization identifiers.
Outcome: Provided detailed remediation guidance including code-level recommendations for centralized authorization middleware. Client implemented fixes within 72 hours. Verification testing confirmed successful remediation. Client achieved SOC 2 certification on schedule.
AWS Security Posture Assessment for Series B Startup
Client: Healthcare technology startup preparing for Series B funding
Challenge: Investors required third-party security assessment of cloud infrastructure before finalizing $25M funding round. Client needed clear prioritization of findings and realistic remediation timeline.
Approach: Conducted comprehensive AWS security review including IAM configuration, network architecture, S3 bucket policies, RDS security, secrets management, and CloudTrail logging. Used combination of automated tooling and manual configuration review.
Key Findings: Identified overly permissive IAM policies granting unnecessary access to production resources, publicly accessible S3 buckets containing application logs with PII, and insufficient network segmentation between development and production environments.
Delivered: Prioritized remediation roadmap with three phases: immediate (high-risk items), short-term (30 days), and strategic improvements (90 days). Provided Terraform code examples for implementing recommended changes.
Outcome: Client resolved all critical findings within 2 weeks. Successfully passed investor security diligence. Closed Series B funding round. Implemented our recommended baseline security configurations across all AWS accounts.
Authentication Weakness in Customer-Facing Portal
Client: Financial services company, 200K+ active users
Challenge: Client experienced suspicious account activity and requested external security assessment of their customer authentication system before potential breach escalation.
Approach: Focused assessment of authentication and session management mechanisms. Tested password reset flows, session handling, MFA implementation, and account recovery procedures. Analyzed both web and mobile API authentication.
Key Finding: Password reset functionality was vulnerable to account takeover via reset token predictability. Tokens used insufficient entropy and could be enumerated. Additionally, session tokens did not properly invalidate after password changes.
Impact: Attackers could potentially compromise user accounts through password reset manipulation. Session persistence after password reset allowed continued access even after victim changed their password.
Outcome: Client immediately disabled password reset functionality, implemented secure token generation using cryptographically secure random values, and added proper session invalidation. Deployed mandatory password reset for all users. No confirmed account compromises after remediation.