Venafi Firefly provides secure communication between computers and can run in any cloud-native environment. This secures your workloads without disrupting them.

Machine identity management is still a relatively new topic in IT security. Intelligent, automated machines need to be able to talk to each other to run workloads. To secure this communication, machines must also be able to show their card when requested. For machines, a “credential” consists of digital certificates and/or cryptographic keys.

If attackers can steal it, they can impersonate a machine and use their machines to confuse the victim’s workload. “Security teams no longer have to consider just who has access to the network, but what,” Venafi’s Kevin Bocek heard at KubeCon 2023. In honor of the cloud-native show, the company is announcing Firefly, its latest “lightweight” machine Identity Management Solution.

Firefly

Venafi Firefly is an easy-to-deploy container that the company says can run in any cloud native environment, as well as DevOps, cloud or PKI. Firefly can issue and monitor machine identities from the data center to the edge. Bocek: “It’s almost sacrilegious to say that at KubeCon, but there’s a world beyond Kubernetes too. Therefore, Firefly must be able to adapt to different environments. We want to give developers the flexibility to use the tool where and when they need it.”

The tool also needs to assign identities quickly to avoid unnecessarily slowing down the workload. “Firefly comes and goes,” adds Bocek. Like a fly, you could say. “The identity of the machines is configured in the Venafi Control Plane and propagated through Firefly instances. In the central administration console, the user gets an insight into the delivery activity. Venafi Firefly therefore requires minimal infrastructure for use in production.”

Venafi Firefly is available today.