Articles about

Machine Identities and Secrets

Why TLS 1.3 and Automated PKI Fall Short of Zero Trust Principles

Enterprises running sensitive business operations in the cloud confront difficult security and privacy challenges. One of them is data loss prevention. While it's true that cloud providers do offer experienced security professionals and tools, it is not true that cybersecurity will be stronger. This article explains some of the reasons why CISOs and security professionals need to take a close look at their application networks and cloud infrastructure. The good news is that innovative solutions to overcome the vulnerabilities and gaps exist and are easy to adopt and implement.

Tom McNamara

September 26, 2024

Machine Identity - Avoid the Crisis

Machines operating across the Internet outnumber humans by a ratio of three-to-one. This will rise dramatically as more Internet of Things (IOT) devices arrive. Existing approaches for managing identity and trust for a massive number of machines rely on centralized and legacy solutions that won't work for the machine era. A decentralized solution capable of speed, trust, and agility is needed to avoid a crisis and enable a graceful transition to high trust machine identities.

Tom McNamara

August 31, 2024

IAM in a Box

Containers are an important part of modern cloud engineering. They evoke the idea of portability and relocation. But in the cloud this is often inhibited because they become anchored to external services within a particular cloud environment, and it becomes difficult to relocate them to a different environment. This article describes how containers can be freed and portability restored.

Tom McNamara

August 31, 2024

An Unintentional Secret - Automated TLS and its Zero Trust Fallacy

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its companion, mutual TLS (mTLS) are stalwart security protocols known for encrypting communications over the Internet. When they are applied to root domains (such as is the case for Web domains and browsers) they represent identity trust. However when they are implemented with automated PKI certificates, they lose an important security quality: identity trust. Due to the speed and scale of cloud automation, the intermediate certificate authorities that issue PKI certificates eliminate vetting of the receiving identity (a containerized workload).

Tom McNamara

September 26, 2024

Machine Identity - Who’s Who in the Cloud?

Identities for machines operating in the cloud, like humans in the natural world, are an important quality that is essential to trust, authorization, and authentication. Machines are identified by cryptographic material that takes the form of a certificate. But in the cloud, it is challenging to find, track, and manage the many certificates that are dynamically assigned and used. New approaches to managing machine identities in a zero trust cloud environment are needed to realize secure business operations in the cloud.

Tom McNamara

August 31, 2024

Keeping Secrets Is Hard

Keeping secrets is hard because they have to stay secret to deliver security. And for machines and workloads in the cloud the consequences to lost secrecy can ripple through the entire business and bring down many digital operations in an instant. Leakage of digital secrets occurs almost naturally over time; disclosure eventually happens and secrecy is lost. But the risk of lost secrecy and the impact to cloud operations is minimized with the right tools.

Tom McNamara

August 31, 2024

When Zero is a Good Thing

As businesses migrate more of their critical processes and data to the cloud and procure SaaS solutions, their attack surface grows significantly. This makes it harder to achieve a zero trust posture, and more risk occurs for employees with the Secret Zero to everything. While tools such as Machine Identity Managers and Secrets Managers (vaults) are improvements for today, they do not solve the growing problem of competition between zero trust and ever-scaling attack surfaces. A strategic solution that responds to the challenges in new ways is needed. (click to read more)

Tom McNamara

August 31, 2024

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