You revoked the token. 3,000 requests still passed.
Your dashboard saw everything. Your gateway stopped nothing. The rate limit was 100/minute. A bot sent 2,400 in 200ms.
Analytics tells you what happened. Atomic enforcement prevents what's happening.
< 50ms
Access Decision
Allow or deny at request time
Atomic
Policy Enforcement
Decision + state mutation together
Live
Identity & Risk State
Session, device, quota reflect this second
Unified
Control Planes
Gateway, auth service, API tier share identical state
The Hidden Problem
Security systems drift under concurrency
Most teams believe they have real-time protection. Risk engines score in milliseconds. SIEM detects anomalies. Redis stores rate counters. Identity services track session state. But under load, these systems evaluate against state that never coexisted.
Your streaming analytics pipeline is perfect. It tells you exactly what happened—400ms after the damage.
Session revocation lags
Account locked at T0. API nodes accept requests for another 400ms. Thousands pass.
Rate limits race
Counter says 80 requests used. Reality is 2,400. Cached state admits the burst.
Device trust drifts
Device marked compromised. Some services still see "trusted." Same session. Different policy.
Cross-service disagreement
Mobile denies access. Web still approves. Same identity. Same second. Different snapshot.
The Exploitation Window
At 30K RPS, a 200ms policy drift allows thousands of unauthorized actions. Attackers exploit coordination gaps—not slow systems.
What Actually Happens
When enforcement isn't atomic, abuse scales
These aren't edge cases. They're the default failure mode of loosely coordinated security systems.
Account locked. 3,000 requests still passed.
A bot triggered risk escalation. Your identity service flagged the account. But revocation propagated asynchronously—API nodes kept accepting requests for another 400ms.
Policy mutation without synchronized enforcement creates breach windows.
Quota exceeded. Counter updated later.
An attacker sent 2,400 parallel requests in 200ms. Each one checked the cached counter. Each saw 'available.' Each passed. By the time counters reconciled, the damage was done.
Cached limits don't enforce policy under burst.
Service A revoked access. Service B didn't.
Mobile denied the request. Web approved it. Same identity. Same second. Different snapshot. Your distributed services evaluated different identity state.
Security systems must agree at decision time—not eventually.
Decision and policy mutation in the same boundary
A security decision without atomic state mutation is a suggestion, not enforcement.
Access decision + risk-state update
In the same transaction. No window where concurrent requests see stale identity.
Quota check + counter increment
Read and mutate atomically. No race between check and use.
Session revocation + global visibility
All services see the lock immediately. No window for stale tokens.
Policy evaluation at decision time
Risk, device, geo, identity—all in one snapshot. No eventual consistency.
What to evaluate
When comparing security infrastructure, these dimensions separate atomic enforcement systems from loosely coordinated policy stacks.
| Criterion | What you need | What most have |
|---|---|---|
| Decision timing | During request | After the fact |
| Risk propagation | Instant across services | Async updates |
| Quota enforcement | Atomic read-modify-write | Cached counters |
| Session revocation | Immediate global visibility | Best-effort invalidation |
| Access decision | Same transactional boundary | Separate detection + enforcement |
How Tacnode Delivers
All access and policy decisions evaluate against identical, live state
Identity, risk signals, quotas, and session state converge in the Context Lake. Each enforcement decision reads and mutates within the same boundary.
No policy drift
Risk state changes propagate instantly. Every service sees the same truth.
No stale counters
Rate limits enforce atomically. Bursts can't exploit cache windows.
No race between detection and enforcement
The decision and the mutation happen together. No exploitation window.
Is this your problem?
If your identity or API platform relies on distributed caches for policy enforcement, you have enforcement windows.
If your security controls touch shared mutable state—quotas, session tokens, device trust, identity flags—and those values change faster than your services synchronize, attackers will find the gap.
When you need this
- •High-RPS APIs exposed to internet traffic
- •Identity systems under adversarial load
- •Multiple services enforcing shared policy
- •Sub-100ms access decisions
When you don't
- •Low traffic internal systems
- •Manual review acceptable
- •Single-service enforcement
- •Seconds of drift tolerable
Stop detecting. Start enforcing.
We'll walk through your security architecture and show you where coordination gaps create exploitation windows.