Glossary
Chaos Engineering
Chaos engineering deliberately injects real infrastructure failures — killing a service, adding latency, cutting network access to a dependency — into a running system to observe whether it actually behaves the way its design intends under those conditions, rather than simply assuming it does based on the design alone. For an authorization system, this means actually killing the policy service and confirming the fail-closed behavior everyone assumes is configured actually triggers, rather than trusting it works because a design document says it should.
This is a different discipline from fuzzing malformed input or from human-led red-teaming: chaos engineering isn't about probing for exploitable logic flaws or malicious input, it's about verifying resilience to the mundane, inevitable infrastructure failures — a crashed process, a network partition, an exhausted resource — that eventually happen to every system regardless of how carefully its logic was designed.