🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, a fascinating piece of performance art. I must say, it’s truly inspired to see such a creative demonstration of database forensics. You've set up a beautiful, hermetically sealed lab environment where the single greatest threat is... yourself, with root access and a dd command. It’s a bold strategy. Let’s see how it plays out.

I genuinely admire the focus. You’ve chosen to address the "persistent myths" about MongoDB's durability by simulating an attack vector so esoteric, it makes a Rowhammer exploit look like a brute-force password guess. Most of us worry about trivial things like SQL injection, unauthenticated access, or ransomware encrypting the entire filesystem. But you, you’re playing 4D chess, preparing for the day a rogue sysadmin with surgical precision decides to swap exactly one old data block for a new one instead of just, you know, exfiltrating the data and dropping the tables. Priorities.

Your setup for PostgreSQL is a masterclass in theatricality. First, you run a container with --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE. A lovely touch. Why bother with the principle of least privilege when you can just give your database process the god-like ability to inspect and tamper with any other process? I’m sure my compliance team would have no notes on that. It's just good, clean fun. And then, after proving that a checksum on a valid-but-outdated block doesn't trigger an error—a scenario that assumes the attacker is aiming for subtle gaslighting rather than actual damage—you move on to the main event.

And what an event it is. To prove MongoDB's superiority, the first step is, naturally, to turn the database container into a full-fledged developer workstation.

apt-get update && apt-get install -y git xxd strace curl jq python3 ... build-essential cmake gcc g++ ...

Magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. You’re not just running a database; you’re hosting a hacker’s starter pack. I appreciate the convenience. When an attacker gets RCE through the next Log4j-style vulnerability in your application, they won't have to bother bringing their own tools. You've already provisioned a compiler, version control, and network utilities for them. It’s just thoughtful. This proactive approach to attacker enablement is something I'll be mentioning in my next SOC 2 audit report. Under the "Opportunities for Improvement" section, of course.

Then comes the pièce de résistance: curl-ing the latest release from a public GitHub API endpoint, piping it to tar, and compiling it from source. On the container. This is a truly bold interpretation of supply chain security. Forget signed artifacts, forget pinned versions, forget reproducible builds. We're living on the edge. Why trust a vetted package repository when you can just pull whatever latest points to? It adds a certain... thrill to deployments.

And the compile flags! -DENABLE_WERROR=0. Chef's kiss. Nothing screams "we are serious about code quality" quite like explicitly telling the compiler, "look, if you see something that looks like an error, just... don't worry about it." It's the software equivalent of putting tape over a check engine light.

After all that, you demonstrate that WiredTiger's "address cookie" correctly identifies the misplaced block. A triumph. In this one, highly specific, manually-induced failure mode that requires full system compromise to execute, your checksum-in-a-pointer worked. So, to be clear, the takeaway is:

• PostgreSQL is vulnerable if an attacker has root, gets past all your OS-level security, and decides to perform microsurgery on your data files with dd.
• MongoDB is secure against this exact same scenario, provided your attacker hasn't also used their root access to patch the wt binary in memory or manipulate the B-Tree pointers directly.

It’s a comforting thought. You've built a beautiful, intricate lock for the front door of a house with no walls.

You haven’t demonstrated robustness; you’ve documented a future root cause analysis for a catastrophic data breach. My report will be scathing.