Modern PaaS is tough because there's a general expectation that users (and agents) are able to see and read back environment variables in their management UI or CLI - which means that you can't segregate credential values from the public web environment. See e.g. the visibility icons on https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/secure/inject-sec...

And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.

Stuff made during the move fast and break things era now doesn't hold up very well in the AI era. Or to say another way: startups are very vulnerable now - this new environment is unforgiving towards cutting corners and/or having inexperienced devs

Why would ai advancement make self hosting painful? Apart from increased cost of hardware (which you implicitly would pay for in PaaS as well anyways).

If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.

They're high-value targets, so that's what attackers are pointing the agents at

According to HN of the last year, "marketing stunts." Remember when Mythos preview was announced only 6 months ago

When you build something small, you can easily see all the doors and properly guard them.

As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.

Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.

Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.

This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.

The solution does not require any new magical tools.