Run Contained Pen Testing as Chaos Experiments Securely
Harness, Wednesday, September 9th, 2026
Running penetration tests as bounded chaos experiments to prove resilience without widening the blast radius.
Harness describes running penetration testing as contained chaos experiments, applying the blast radius discipline from chaos engineering to security testing.
The method addresses the practical tension that makes realistic security testing rare in production: proving resilience requires exercising failure, while exercising failure in production risks causing the incident you were testing for.
Bounding the experiment scope and defining abort conditions in advance is what makes the test acceptable to operations teams who would otherwise refuse.