All cryptographic assets (SSH, SSL/TLS, code signing, etc.) must be managed effectively and protected from misuse to ensure that every identity can be verified and trusted.
Machine identity management aims to establish and manage trust in the identity of every machine across your enterprise. It enables organizations to manage the lifecycle of credentials used by an organization to build trust and achieve crypto-agility.
Cryptographic incidents, such as the compromise of an encryption protocol, or advances in technology, such as quantum computing, make agility an important factor of trust. Organizations need to be agile to be able to respond swiftly to these events without disrupting their trust infrastructure.
To achieve that, a strong identity governance and administration strategy must be in place. The strategy should help to discover and manage identities and credentials throughout the lifecycle.
The strategy and the tools used to implement enterprise-wide machine identity management should allow for the following:
- Visibility: Continuous discovery of all keys and certificates is critical to know how many you have, who they belong to, what access they provide, and when they need to be rotated or renewed.
- Governance: Ensuring proper ownership and control over how keys are generated, used and distributed is critical to prevent misuse or theft.
- Protection: Keys must be generated securely and with adequate entropy, issuing authorities must be trusted, and private keys must be stored securely. If these protections aren’t in place, machine identities can’t be trusted.
- Distribution: Automating the issuance and distribution of credentials is critical for creating and maintaining trust anchors, especially with ephemeral workloads.
- Rotation: Automated rotation or renewal of keys, secrets, and certificates is the key to minimize outages and vulnerabilities caused by expired or weak credentials.
Knowing who and what can be trusted to access critical data and infrastructure is a serious challenge. Keyfactor empowers enterprises of all sizes to securely connect trusted people, devices, and applications across their business.