The Contained Pen Test: Proving Resilience Without Widening the Blast Radius | Harness Blog

Harness promotes “contained pen tests” as narrowly defined, security-approved failure experiments that run within CI/CD pipelines rather than granting broad production access for traditional penetration testing. Each experiment targets one service and condition, such as identity-provider outages, credential revocation, expired certificates, tampered tokens, unexpected outbound traffic, privilege drift, abuse-like load, or node failures, to verify whether controls fail closed instead of silently permitting unsafe behavior. The approach emphasizes authoring and approving tests once, then running them automatically on every release while generating immutable audit evidence of results, suppressions, and skipped checks. By predicting and ranking risks before applying the smallest necessary disruption, the model aims to make security validation a repeatable governance and release-gating process suited to regulated environments, with Harness offering limited free monthly runs for its Resilience Testing platform.

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