HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
cilium
tetragon
C2022–2025
cilium / tetragon

tetragon

eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement

5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-05-16 15:59:55 UTC to 2025-11-02 00:04:40 UTC.

0122022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
Cool tool! Is the inotify directory/file watch count the limit? I can't seem to remember the name of the pre-containers tool that creates a virtual build root and traps all the file syscalls. It's not strace. Easier to trace everything an AI runs by running the agent in a container with limited access to specific filesystem volumes. eBPF is the fastest way to instrument in Linux AFAIU: Traceleft: https://github.com/ShiftLeftSecurity/traceleft Tracee: https://github.com/aquasecurity/tracee Falco docs > Supported events: https://falco.org/docs/reference/rules/supported-events/ Tetragon: https://github.com/cilium/tetragon strace could have a --diff-fs-syscall-files option: strace -p PID -f -F -e trace=file -s 65536
In Diffwatch – Watch AI agents touch the FS and see diffs live
While the TrailOfBits post is informative, they extrapolate the wrong premise from Brendan Gregg's original post[1]. Brendan's statement was originally about the particular set of eBPF tools created for observability (especially his own). These tools (like bcc and bpftrace) are specifically geared towards observability and were not built for security in mind, nor will they be "patched" or fixed for these purposes. Does this imply that eBPF is a bad foundation for security-focused tooling? Brendan states the following at the close of this blog post: > There is potential for an awesome eBPF security product, and it's not just the visibility that's valuable (all those arrows) it's also the low overhead. These slides included our overhead evaluation showing bcc/eBPF was far more efficient than auditd or go-audit. (It was pioneering work, but
Read the rest
unfortunately the slides are all we have: Alex, I, and others left Netflix before open sourcing it.) There are now other eBPF security products, including open source projects (e.g., tetragon), but I don't know enough about them all to have a recommendation. > Note that I'm talking about the observability tools here and not the eBPF kernel runtime itself, which has been designed as a secure sandbox. Nor am I talking about privilege escalation, since to run the tools you already need root access (that car has sailed!). This reads to me that security tooling built on top of eBPF is possible and various organizations are in-flight making it happen (such as Falco[2], Tetragon[3], and Tracee[4]). These teams have recognized the shortcomings of eBPF and are layering other kernel-instrumentation capabilities such as kprobes and LSM hooks into their solutions. Additionally, the TrailOfBits blog post states: > Developers need to be aware of pitfalls like probe unreliability, data truncation, instruction limits, concurrency issues, event overload, and page faults. Workarounds exist, but they are imperfect and often add complexity. These inherent limitations exist primarily because eBPF is a virtual machine within kernel space. Many of these constraints exist because eBPF programs should _never_ lock up the kernel. The eBPF verifier[5] does some checks on the possible code paths the program can take, such as finite bounded loops, null checks on variables, etc. The foundational aspect here is that the eBPF virtual machine is designed to protect the kernel while running programs in kernel space, and that imperfect/complex workarounds may be needed by security-focused projects to respect that foundation. [1] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2023-04-28/ebpf-security-i... [2] https://github.com/falcosecurity/falco/ [3] https:/github.com/cilium/tetragon [4] https://github.com/aquasecurity/tracee [5] https://docs.kernel.org/bpf/verifier.html
In Linux runtime security agent powered by eBPF
I heard about some recent eBPF vulnerabilities and while I was looking at the kernel code for eBPF I noticed there was some relatively new IMA additions. It seems there’s quite a number of new security mechanisms that can be used with eBPF. Mostly the fact that they added IMA support just stood out to me and seems to say “you should definitely use it if you’re going to use eBPF.” https://lwn.net/Articles/886575/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/live-patch-security-vulnerabilit... https://github.com/robertosassu/diglim-ebpf Of course IMA doesn’t really help much if it’s not used correctly https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YtgQKHwPAVBSHjcY@kroah.com/T/ It is interesting to hear about the problems that eBPF has but it would be helpful to see more people talking about ways that you can minimize the problems or reasons why you can’t EDIT This is also k
Read the rest
In On Bypassing eBPF Security Monitoring

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.