The IT Nerd

Venafi, the inventor of machine identity management, today introduced Venafi Firefly, the only lightweight machine identity issuer that supports highly distributed, cloud native environments. Part of the Venafi Control Plane for Machine Identities, Firefly enables security teams to easily and securely meet developer-driven machine identity management requirements for cloud native workloads by issuing machine identities, such as TLS and SPIFFE, locally at high speeds across any environment. By delivering added speed, reliability and security for machine identities in modern architectures, it helps organizations ensure identities adhere to corporate security policies, while accelerating application development and digital transformation.

Venafi Firefly is delivered as an easy-to-deploy container that can run in any cloud native environment, providing a fast, easy and secure way to issue machine identities. Machine identity policy is configured in the Venafi Control Plane and inherited by Firefly instances. Together, the Venafi Control Plane and Venafi Firefly provide a lightweight, distributed architecture that makes Firefly the only machine identity issuer for modern use cases requiring local high-speed autonomous issuance, low-latency cloud native use cases and advanced CI/CD with identity provider embedded in the pipeline.

Key capabilities include:

• Observability – Through the Venafi Control Plane, Venafi Firefly delivers visibility into distributed issuance activity. This extends Control Plane observability of machine identities from the datacenter to the cloud and the edge.
• Consistency – Venafi Firefly gives security teams control over policy for machine identities issued to modern applications in cloud native environments and ensures developers use a secure and consistent issuer.
• Reliability – Venafi Firefly requires minimal infrastructure to deploy in production to achieve high availability and fault tolerance.
• Freedom of Choice – Venafi Firefly has multiple deployment options, including cloud native, DevOps, cloud and federated PKI environments, giving developers flexibility to use Firefly wherever and whenever it’s needed.

Venafi Firefly is unmatched in reducing complexity and increasing the speed of development, while at the same time increasing security for machine identities needed for modern cloud native applications.

Venafi Firefly is generally available today to all customers. To download a free trial, please visit https://venafi.com/try-venafi/firefly/

Venafi, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today introduced TLS Protect for Kubernetes. As part of the Venafi Control Plane for machine identities, TLS Protect for Kubernetes enables security and platform teams to easily and securely manage cloud native machine identities, such as TLS, mTLS and SPIFFE, across all of an enterprise’s multi-cloud and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. By delivering increased visibility, control and automation over machine identity management within more complex cloud native infrastructures, it helps enterprises improve application reliability and reduce development and operational costs. 

Built with a fully supported version of the cert-manager open source project – the de facto cloud native solution designed by Jetstack, a Venafi company, for developers to automate TLS and mTLS certificate issuance and renewal – TLS Protect for Kubernetes provides in-cluster observability to identify and remediate security risks stemming from poorly configured certificates, as well as offers options for security controls over certificate issuance to meet the security team policy for enforcing trust. It also includes a management interface that provides full visibility of public trusted certificates for ingress TLS, as well as private certificates for inter-service mTLS for pod-to-pod and service mesh use cases. By building a detailed view of the enterprise security posture across multiple clusters and cloud platforms, including certificates that have been manually created by developers, it proactively identifies operational issues that help platform teams maintain cluster integrity and prevent outages.

Features in TLS Protect for Kubernetes include:

• Observability – Through a comprehensive web-based management interface, security and platform teams can easily discover machine identities used across all clusters, including alerts on machine identity management infrastructure health, compliance and configuration. It provides an instant visual status of all workload certificates, including their association with Kubernetes resources and X.509 certificate configurations. This includes certificates that have been manually created by developers. The interface works as both a cluster monitoring and machine identity management tool to identify potential security holes, such as unauthorized workloads, and proactively recommend fixes for identified cluster configuration errors.
• Consistency – TLS Protect for Kubernetes enforces machine identity policy for TLS, mTLS and SPIFFE VID across all clusters based on enterprise security policies and ensures the proper version of cert-manager is used and configured consistently.
• Reliability – The product integrates natively with Kubernetes environments to ensure performance and scalability, including a commercially supported, FIPS 140-2 compliant and signed version of the open source cert-manager project to provide enterprise-grade machine identity management across Kubernetes environments. As each new cluster is created, security teams can empower platform teams by using TLS Protect for Kubernetes to automatically bootstrap a fully supported and hardened version of cert-manager with each new cluster. This delivers better consistency for the way security tooling is managed across multi-cluster environments and reduces the risk of security drift for production environments.
• Freedom of Choice – TLS Protect for Kubernetes supports multi-cloud configurations, cloud platform providers and Kubernetes distributions. It also integrates with popular secrets vaults and other DevOps and cloud native solutions.

TLS Protect for Kubernetes is generally available today to all customers. To learn more about the new product, please visit https://venafi.com/tls-protect-for-kubernetes/ or join the upcoming “Using Venafi for policy and control of certificate lifecycle management in Kubernetes” webinar on February 23 at 8:00am PST/11:00am EST/4:00pm GMT. Register for the webinar at https://trust.venafi.com/automate-certificate-policy-in-kubernetes/. 

Venafi, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today released its predictions for the cybersecurity landscape in 2023, indicating that this will be one the most challenging years yet for the cybersecurity industry.

“With economic uncertainty casting a heavy shadow across the globe, the geopolitical landscape the most unstable it’s been in decades and cloud migration marching on relentlessly, cybersecurity has never been more important. This will present unprecedented challenges for security teams in 2023,” comments Kevin Bocek, VP of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi.

The predictions include insights from Bocek; Matt Barker, president of cloud native solutions; Yana Blachman, threat intelligence specialist; Sitaram Iyer, senior director of cloud native solutions; and Pratik Savla, lead security engineer, on the year ahead. Highlights include:

1. “The ransomware cash cow may stop mooing in 2023, forcing hackers to pivot to other revenue generators – like selling stolen machine identities. We’ve already seen a high price for code signing machine identities on dark web markets, and groups like Lapsus$ regularly use them to launch devastating attacks. Their value will only increase this coming year.” – Kevin Bocek
    
2. “In 2023, we will see continued efforts to manage the risk posed by software supply chain attacks, with more start-ups and open source tools – like cosign and sigstore – designed to help in this area. Biden’s SBOM initiative has helped bring attention to the requirement, with The OpenSSF leading the charge. As a result, we expect to see some positive movement in this space.” – Matt Barker
    
3. “Russian cyberattacks will aim to disrupt the West’s greatest asset – their economies – as Russia is excluded from the international finance community. Cyber-enabled economic warfare will be crucial to Russia’s geopolitical strategy, with the aim of either generating revenue or disrupting rival economies. We’ve already started to see this with recent attacks on the US Treasury.” – Yana Blachman
    
4. “Nation state attacks will become more feral as ground war tactics become more untamed and unpredictable, bringing the cyber and physical worlds into a collision course. These will have the potential to spill over into other nations, as Russia becomes more daring, trying to win the war by any means – and could be used as a distraction to target other nations with cyberattacks.” – Kevin Bocek
    
5. “The rise of the platform engineering team will be one of the big trends of 2023. Cloud Native reimagines how companies think about building and operating infrastructure; they require a totally new team to build and support it. Platform engineering teams will build on the learnings of DevOps culture, encompassing every persona needed to build and run IT infrastructure – including Dev, Security and Operations.” – Matt Barker
    
6. “As we build our knowledge of cloud risk, we’ll start to uncover breaches we knew nothing about. We’ll find that threat actors are ahead of the curve and have already infiltrated cloud networks – perhaps weeks, months or even years ago.” – Yana Blachman
    
7. “There will be more failed audits in regulated industries as multi-cloud, multi-cluster complexity causes companies to breach compliance requirements. The increased volume of machine identities in cloud native environments will make compliance with regulations on machine identity management a real challenge. If this process isn’t automated via a control plane, failed audits will become commonplace.” – Sitaram Iyer
    
8. “With cloud costs predicted to rise by as much as a third in the coming year, we will see an increased focus on FinOps – i.e., financial operations – a management practice to promote shared responsibility for an organization’s cloud computing infrastructure and costs. How FinOps is implemented in Cloud Native and which tools you should use to help manage it, including security solutions, will come into sharp focus in 2023.” – Matt Barker
    
9. “In 2023, API security will rise to the top as one of the biggest concerns and priorities for enterprises as organizations increasingly move to an API-first software development approach. This exponential adoption of APIs will exacerbate security concerns, with the potential to cause significant security breaches.” – Pratik Savla
    
10. “As recession bites, we expect to see more everyday people turning to cybercrime as a source of income in 2023. Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) will rise, as they enable people that don’t have technical skills to launch attacks.” – Yana Blachman

Venafi, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced the findings of a new crawler report from security researcher and TLS expert, Scott Helme. The report, which Venafi sponsored, evaluates the use of encryption across the world’s top one million sites over the last six months and reveals the need for a control plane to automate the management of machine identities in increasingly complex cloud environments.

The research suggests that while progress has been made in some areas, more education is needed to ensure that machine identities are used in the most effective way to protect our online world: 

• Use of TLSv1.2 has declined by 13% over the last six months, with v1.3 in use by almost 50% of sites — more than twice as many sites as v1.2. The adoption of v1.3 is being driven by widespread digital transformation. initiatives, cloud migration and new cloud native stacks that default to v1.3.
• Even though organizations are adopting stronger TLS protocols, they are failing to couple this with a move to stronger keys for TLS machine identities.
• Industry-standard ECDSA keys are now used by just 17% of websites — up from 14% six months ago. Slower, less secure RSA keys are still used by 39% of the top one million websites.
• Growth in the adoption of HTTPS has plateaued at 72% — the same level as in December.

Let’s Encrypt continues to be the Certificate Authority (CA) of choice for the top one million, but Cloudflare is making up ground. This uptake seems to be the driving force behind TLS v1.3 adoption, with 50% of the websites deploying v1.3 doing so through Cloudflare. The decline in use of Extended Validation (EV) certificates has also continued, with a 16% decrease in the past six months, following changes from browser makers that dramatically reduced the value of EV certificates to website owners. 

There is some good news in this analysis. The data suggests that organizations are taking more steps to manage their machine identity environments. Since December, there has also been a 13% increase in the number of sites making use of Certificate Authority authorization (CAA), which enables companies to create a list of approved CAs that can be used within their organizations. The adoption of this control is a positive sign that organizations seem aware of the importance of machine identities in overall security and are showing increased vigilance in the ways in which they manage them.

For more information on the report please visit the blog.