When Venafi launched the $12 million Development Fund in 2018, we knew it was going to be big. But we didn’t predict the wide ranging impact of this innovation engine. And now that Venafi has joined forces with CyberArk the pace of Machine Identity Security innovation is accelerating.
From technology leaders to cutting-edge startups and independent developers, the who’s who of machine identity have competed to join forces with Venafi in creating the world’s most expansive ecosystem for machine identities. To date, we have funded more than 50 innovative developers bringing new capabilities to allow customers to accelerate machine identity security across their environments.
This year at Machine Identity Security Summit 2024, we put innovation to the test with our second annual innovation challenge. Under the umbrella of this year’s summit theme, Forging the Future of Cybersecurity, our challenge was entitled “Forge of Innovation.” Hosted by our own Chief Innovation Officer, Kevin Bocek, this second annual challenge featured our top Development Fund partners who competed for the chance to be recognized as providing the most future-proof value to organizations like yours. Votes were tallied from the audience as well as from a LinkedIn live stream.
Check out these contenders:
Winner: Corsha, Anusha Iyer, CEO
Machine identities used in API authentication are typically long-lived and easy to steal and reuse. Corsha solves this problem by providing a second layer of machine identity that is dynamic and unique to each machine, which enables zero-trust access for API services.
Corsha’s dynamic authentication is built on its Distributed Network Ledger (DLN) infrastructure that integrates with Venafi using cert-manager for:
- Maintaining mutualTLS between internal resources within the DLN
- Securing all ingress resources into the cluster
- Provisioning new Hyperledger Fabric client identities
- Improved certificate rotation and revocation
Runners up
Cyrpto4A, Bruno Couillard, CEO
Crypto4A’s quantum-ready Hardware Security Modules provide additional security to the Venafi Platform by providing secure storage and generation of machine identities. Until now organization have not been prepared for a post-quantum world where cryptographic systems, like machine identities, cannot be trusted. Crypto4A’s quantum ready HSM, QxEdge supports a native integration to Venafi platform. This allows Venafi Control Plane the ability to utilize the HSM for secure key generation used in the creation of machine identities, as well as additional protections for the Venafi database. Venafi and Crpyto4a have been at the cutting of post-quantum readiness: automating secured issuance of post-quantum hybrid certificates in 2021.
Device Authority, James Penney, CTO
Device Authority Keyscaler, TLS Protect, and Venafi CodeSign Protect provide an end-to-end solution for signing software code and automating the secure delivery of updates to IoT devices. IoT software and firmware updates are one of the most common ways cyber criminals can access your private information. KeyScaler Secure Updates combats this by delivering updates securely to IoT devices. Combined with Venafi’s CodeSign Protect code signing service, it provides an end-to-end solution for delivering secure updates.
Nirmata, Ritesh Patel, Co-Founder & VP Product
Today, security teams are facing a wave of new Kubernetes applications without certainty over the integrity and provenance of approved containers. Code signing containers and validating them before admission can stop unauthorized code. Nirmata helps automate the entire workflow of securing containers, establish admission policies, and validating admission with Venafi CodeSign Protect. Nirmata supports signing container images using cosign and Venafi. Nirmata verifies signed container images during Kubernetes admission controls using Venafi. This integration allows SecOps engineers to define policies that can be used to ensure that only verified and attested images are deployed to their clusters.
N8n, Angel Menendez, Developer Advocate
With no code automation with visual design, n8n is building fast, visual-based automation for machine identity security by seamlessly connecting Venafi to n8n integrations with most popular software and SaaS services that need machine identities. n8n delivers a no-code automation platform that makes it easy for DevOps and engineering teams to innovate and develop applications that connect platforms like Venafi. This out-of-the-box Venafi integration enables the procurement and inclusion of machine identities within n8n workflows.
Check out all our innovations
At Machine Identity Security Summit, we were only able to feature the top contenders who competed in the Forge of Innovation challenge. But you can check out the broad scope of additional Development Fund innovations at https://venafi.com/development-fund/.