This year’s Black Hat delivered on every front – uniting the global security community to share insights, challenge assumptions, and push the industry forward. Black Hat wanted to highlight breakthrough technologies and next-generation approaches to enterprise security through live demonstrations, expert presentations, and direct engagement with the security community.
The event launched the inaugural Innovation Lab, where standout cybersecurity companies were selected to question the ideas and pressure-test use cases. Keyfactor was one of only six companies invited to participate, and we’re proud to say we brought home the Outstanding New Technology award from the showcase!
It Takes a Team
As we have all seen, today’s market is crowded with security solutions making bold AI and security claims. What sets a solution apart is the willingness to put those claims under real scrutiny – and that is precisely what we did.
Our team rose to the challenge. Mitch Mershon, Senior Product Marketing Manager, delivered an engaging 10-minute live pitch on August 5 and 6. Mike Bodette, Senior Channel Solutions Engineer, showcased the Keyfactor Trust Control Plane, bringing our technology and vision to life through a compelling demonstration while fielding questions from undercover judges. Ellen Boehm, Senior Vice President of Strategy and AI Innovation, took the stage on Wednesday with WWT Field CISO Chris Roberts to discuss AI agents, quantum risks, and cryptographic blind spots in a fireside chat, “You Can’t Secure What You Can’t Trust.” Together, they demonstrated how organizations can gain continuous visibility and control over the machine identities and cryptography their businesses depend on.
Within the showcase, Keyfactor was joined by five other leaders in cybersecurity innovation – Command Zero, Droppel, Claroty, Filigran, and BlackCloak. Each company brought something legitimately new to the table. We were judged across three categories – Innovation/“Wow,” Usefulness/Impact, and Pitch/Delivery. Black Hat attendees also voted for Fan Favorite.
Our win reflects strength across both technical scoring and the room’s reaction, recognition from the security community and the people using the solution we are developing.
It Starts with Trust
As demonstrated at this year’s event, we are providing a much-needed, unified operating model for the machine identities and cryptography that secure every digital interaction with the Keyfactor Trust Control Plane. Our proven solution brings together the tools organizations use to manage cryptographic assets and infrastructure into one system, enabling security teams to:
- See everything: Gain complete visibility into the cryptography across their network, cloud, code, and applications, surfacing hidden risk before it becomes an outage.
- Establish trust: Issue cryptographically verifiable identities and sign code on a single, quantum-resilient foundation that replaces legacy systems and point tools.
- Move faster: Automate the manual work of finding and fixing risky or non-compliant identities, with self-service workflows that scale.
- Stay resilient: Adapt to new standards and emerging threats without disrupting the business.
Gone are the days of a checklist of disconnected tasks. The Trust Control Plane operates as a continuous loop, observe, analyze, provision, orchestrate, and govern. As a result, discovery informs risk-based decisions, automation carries them into action, and governance validates every step against policy.
It Starts Now
Sponsored by World Wide Technology (WWT), the Innovation Lab spotlighted breakthrough technologies that are defining the future of cybersecurity, from quantum computing and AI-driven defense to next-generation infrastructure. Judges included: Kent Noyes Assistant Vice President of Global Cyber Architecture and Innovation, WWT; Ashish Upadhyay, Assistant Vice President of Global Partner Alliances, WWT; Jason Nations, Field CISO, Stream Security; Kate Kuehn, Assistant Vice President of Global Cyber Advocacy, WWT; Jordan Hildebrand, Global Cyber Practice Director, WWT; and Heath Stockton, Managing Director, Booz Allen Hamilton.
Through live demos, expert presentations, and conversations with security experts, together we explored emerging solutions for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. No slide decks, no hypotheticals – just real approaches to real problems, like the constantly shifting trust infrastructure.
Trust infrastructure is the cryptographic foundation that makes the digital economy run. And like every other kind of critical infrastructure—power, water, energy—most people don’t think about it until it breaks. The future doesn’t begin with quantum or AI. It begins with the trust we build right now.
Learn more about trust infrastructure and how it requires continuous, system-level control.
