Resilience And Blast Radius Design

Design or audit a system's resilience posture using a layered framework — defense in depth, controlled degradation (load shedding vs. throttling), blast radius compartmentalization (role/location/time), failure domains, 3-tier component reliability hierarchy, and continuous validation. Use this skill when designing a new system for failure, reviewing an existing architecture for single points of failure, limiting blast radius of a potential attack or outage, deciding fail-open vs. fail-closed behavior for a component, or building an incident-response-ready compartmentalization strategy.

Install

Claude CodeClawhHubnpxCursorCodexGemini CLI

1. Add marketplace

› /plugin marketplace add bookforge-ai/bookforge-skills

2. Install plugin

› /plugin install building-secure-and-reliable-systems@bookforge-skills

3. Use the skill

› /resilience-and-blast-radius-design

CC-BY-SA · Open sourceGitHub

Source Book

Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, Adam Stubblefield

More from Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Securityhybrid

Adversary Profiling And Threat Modeling

Profile the likely adversaries targeting a system and produce a structured threat model with prioritized threat scenarios. Use when: designing a new system or service and need to identify who might attack it and how; evaluating whether existing security controls address the right threats; preparing a threat model document for a security review, compliance audit, or architecture decision record; assessing insider risk for a system that handles sensitive data or privileged operations; or mapping attack lifecycle stages to defensive controls. Applies the three adversary frameworks — attacker motivations, attacker profiles, and attack lifecycle stages — alongside a four-dimension actor-motive-action-target threat scenario matrix to produce ranked threat scenarios. Distinct from vulnerability assessment (which audits specific technical flaws) and penetration testing (which actively exploits weaknesses). Produces: adversary profile summary, insider risk matrix, threat scenario list ranked by likelihood and impact, and per-stage defensive control recommendations.

Securityhybrid

Disaster Risk Assessment

Use when you need to assess disaster risk for a system or organization, perform structured risk analysis before disaster planning, identify which disasters to plan for, build a prioritized risk register, quantify probability and impact of failure scenarios, or answer "what disasters should we prepare for and in what order."

Securityfull

Dos Defense And Mitigation

Design DoS-resistant systems or respond to an active denial-of-service attack. Use this skill when designing a new service and want to evaluate its attack surface and build in layered defenses, assessing whether a production system's architecture is DoS-hardened, investigating a traffic spike to determine whether it is an attack or a self-inflicted surge, detecting a client retry storm and needing to apply backoff and jitter fixes, building or reviewing a DoS mitigation system (detection + response pipeline), or deciding how to respond strategically to an ongoing attack without leaking information about your defenses to the adversary.

Securityplan-only

Incident Response Team Setup

Use when you need to set up an incident response team from scratch, design an IR team charter, define severity and priority models for incidents, create IR playbooks, build a structured testing program, design tabletop exercises, or answer "how do we build and validate our incident response capability."