securityJuly 3, 2026· 6 min read

The five gates every write passes before it can poison your cache

In any shared cache, one crafted answer could get served to thousands. So every write runs a five-stage gauntlet before it's ever eligible to be reused.

Here's an attack most people never consider. In a multi-tenant cache, if an attacker can get a poisoned answer stored, it doesn't hit one victim, it gets served to everyone who asks a similar question. The blast radius is the whole user base. A cache that reuses answers has to treat every write as a potential attack.

In plain words: Before any answer becomes reusable, Crowkis scores it through five independent checks. If the composite score is too low, the write is refused and logged, it never gets a chance to be served.

the write-trust pipeline

Coherence, content, source trust, isolation, and a neighbourhood outlier check, every write earns its place.

The point isn't any single gate; it's that they're independent. An attacker might fool one, but slipping a poisoned, incoherent, low-trust, out-of-distribution answer past all five at once is a genuinely hard problem, and every failed attempt leaves a trail in the ledger.

The bottom line

A shared cache is a shared attack surface. Score every write like it might be hostile, and cache poisoning stops being a headline waiting to happen.