Following a product launch at work earlier this year, I theorised if someone was watching the published lists of SSL Certificates they could potentially sneak a peak at things before they were publicised. Probably far too much noise to monitor continuously, but as a potential hint towards naming of things with a more targeted search it might be useful. Sites like https://crt.sh/ and https://censys.io/certificates make these logs searchable and queryable.

Fast forward to this week, where at HashiConf Digital HashiCorp are announcing two new products, which they’ve been teasing for a month or so. Watching Boundary get announced in the HashiConf opening keynote I then wondered what the second project might be called.

I’ve spent a chunk of the last month looking at various HashiCorp documentation for their projects, and I noticed they have a pattern recently of using <name>project.io as the product websites. The newly announced Boundary also fits this pattern.

🤔 Could I figure out the second product name 24 hours before public release? Amazingly, yes! 🎉

Searching at random for all certificates issued for *project.io was probably going to be a bit futile, so to narrow the search space slightly I started by looking at when boundaryproject.io had its certificate issued, and who by. The list of things I spotted were:

• Common name is “boundaryproject.io”
• Issued by LetsEncrypt (no real surprise there)
• Issued on 2020-09-23
• Leaf certificate
• Not yet expired (still trusted)
• No alternate names in the certificate

Loading up https://censys.io/certificates and building a query for this, resulted in a regexp lookup against the common name, and an issued at date range of 10 days, just before and a week after the boundary certificate issued date.

parsed.subject.common_name:/[a-z]+project\.io/ AND 
parsed.issuer.organization.raw:"Let's Encrypt" AND 
parsed.validity.start:["2020-09-20" TO "2020-09-30"] AND
tags.raw:"leaf" AND 
tags.raw:"trusted"

(Run the search yourself)

Searching brought back a couple of pages of results, I scanned them by eye and copied out the ones that only had the single name in the certificate which resulted in the following shortlist:

• boundaryproject.io
• essenceproject.io
• lumiereproject.io
• techproject.io
• udproject.io
• vesselproject.io
• waypointproject.io

We already know about Boundary, so the fact I found it in our list suggests the query might have captured the new product site too. Loading all these sites in a web browser showed some had password protection on them (ooh!) and some just plain didn’t load (ooh!), and some others were blatently other things (boo!). Removing the latter ones left us with a much shorter list:

• essenceproject.io
• udproject.io¹
• waypointproject.io

All domains on the internet have to point somewhere, using DNS records. On a hunch I looked up a couple of the existing HashiCorp websites to see if they happened to all point at the same IP Address(es).

$ host boundaryproject.io
boundaryproject.io has address 76.76.21.21
$ host nomadproject.io 
nomadproject.io has address 76.76.21.21
$ host hashicorp.com | head -1
hashicorp.com has address 76.76.21.21

Ah ha, now I wonder if any of the shortlist also points to 76.76.21.21 🤔²

$ host essenceproject.io | head -1
essenceproject.io has address 198.185.159.145
$ host udproject.io | head -1
udproject.io has address 137.74.116.3
$ host waypointproject.io
waypointproject.io has address 76.76.21.21

🎉 Excellent, https://waypointproject.io was a password protected site pointed at HashiCorp’s IP address 🎉

I then wondered if I could verify this somehow ahead of waiting for the second keynote. I firstly tweeted about it but didn’t name Waypoint explicitly, just hid “way” and “point” in the tweet. I got a reply from @ksatirli which suggested it was correct (and then later @mitchellh confirmed it.³)

HashiCorp also does a lot in public, and all the source code and related materials are on GitHub so perhaps some of their commit messages or marketing sites will contain reference to Waypoint. One github search later across their organisation: https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ahashicorp+waypoint&type=issues and I’d discovered a commit in the newly-public hashicorp/boundary-ui repo which references Waypoint: 346f76404

chore: tweak colors to match waypoint and for a11y

Good enough for me, now to wait and see what the project is for. Given it’s now all announced and live, you can just visit https://waypointproject.io to find out! (It’s so much cooler/useful than I’d hoped for.)