AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key
Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.
Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.
Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users
OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.
OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.
Synology ActiveProtect Manager 2.0 improves AI-driven security
Synology released ActiveProtect Manager 2.0, expanding backup coverage to EC2, Azure, Proxmox and Google Workspace, with AI anomaly detection and malware scanning coming in 2.1.
Synology launched ActiveProtect Manager 2.0 for its DP Series data protection appliances, adding platform coverage for Amazon EC2, Azure VM, Proxmox VE, Nutanix AHV and Google Workspace. The release introduces cross-platform recovery, expanded backup destinations including Azure Blob Storage, and volume-level software storage encryption. The upcoming 2.1 update will add AI/ML anomaly detection tracking change rates, mass deletions and entropy, plus pre-restore malware scanning using Microsoft Defender, Bitdefender and ESET with Auto Fallback to the last clean version.