Innovation targets hard problems at RSA Conference

Article for SiliconANGLE by Jason Bloomberg

The RSA Conference 2023 is now in the books, hosting more than 40,000 attendees and hundreds of exhibitors at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and giving chief information security officers and other cybersecurity professionals a mind-numbing shopping list of must-have security gear.

My mission: Narrow down the throngs of vendors to a handful of innovative standouts – those whose disruptive differentiations fall outside big-analyst categorizations. Here are my top seven:

Rethinking identity

Identity is at the heart of cybersecurity – but it is also central to the plans of bad actors. Rethinking how we represent and secure identities was an important theme at RSAC.

Venafi

Venafi Inc. provides PKI-based machine identity management for any type of nonhuman endpoint, including servers, microservices and devices.

Venafi also offers a control plane for managing keys and certificates at the massive scale that organizations with potentially millions of machine identities require.

What makes Venafi stand out: It supports ephemeral identities for Kubernetes objects, including clusters within large fleets.

Teleport

Teleport (officially Gravitational Inc.) leverages biometrics, Trusted Platform Modules built into most laptops, and Hardware Security Modules on the server side to provide secretless access to server and cloud-based services.

Secrets include passwords, application programming interface keys, and the keys that remote access tools such as Secure Shell and Remote Desktop Protocol use to connect clients to server-side resources. Even browser cookies are on the list.

As a result, Teleport makes its customers entirely immune to any kind of attack that involves the theft of a secret.

What makes Teleport stand out: It works with both fixed and ephemeral server-side resources, including all cloud and Kubernetes services.

Fastly

Fastly Inc. is best known for its content delivery network, but it has continued its innovation at the edge. First-generation CDNs serve up static content at the cloud edge, but Fastly has been building a WebAssembly-based web application firewall that also serves as a proxy and gateway.

This WAF can run on-premises, on the edge or any combination, and it supports WebSockets, gRPC, GraphQL and other protocols.

What makes Fastly stand out: Unlike traditional WAFs, Fastly doesn’t use rules based on regular expression pattern matching. Instead, it uses a more sophisticated parsing technology that is better able to catch malicious traffic in real time.

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