Machine Identity Management Development Fund Adds Indie Developers Program

Sponsorships now available for individual open source developers for innovative new projects

SALT LAKE CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#Cybersecurity—Venafi^®, the inventor and leading provider of machine identity management, today announced the launch of the Indie Developers Program. As a part of the Machine Identity Management Development Fund, the program pays individual developers for innovative, open source machine identity projects.

Venafi recognizes the unique contribution individual developers make to the open source community, and this new program will provide Venafi customers with cutting edge solutions from the innovative developers in the machine identity management space. By participating in the Indie Developers program, individual developers receive direct sponsorship from Venafi to work on projects that matter to them and the community. The Indie Developer Program will fast track and prioritize projects that protect the machine identities found in microservices, service mesh and multicloud environments.

Developers in the program get access to:

• Open source toolkits in Go, Python, Java and Ruby to accelerate development and testing.
• Preconfigured cloud instances for immediate, on-demand development.
• Full support from Venafi engineers.
• Go-to-market leadership to help educate potential customers and drive demand for new solutions.

“This is just one more way Venafi is demonstrating our support for the open source community,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. “We recognize that some of the most interesting, risk-taking and innovative work being done is from individual experts who are close to the emerging problems in the cloud-native world. We want to encourage developers to work on projects they love and care about, and ultimately, our program helps Venafi customers and the open source community as a whole. This new program builds on previous commitments Venafi has delivered to the open source community through our sponsorship and recent merger with Jetstack, as well as sponsorships for Fullstaq, Pulumi, OpenFaaS, Indellient, OpenCredo, Portshift (now part of Cisco) and dozens more.”

Indie Developers who have recently joined the Development Fund are:

• Haresh Singh Kainth, PhD. Kubernetes is considered the de-facto operating system for orchestrating containers in the cloud. However, there are few controls for interservice communication, and the ability to identify bad actors is an impossible task for humans. Dr. Kainth’s Indie Dev project is building a behavior-based continuous authorization service. The project controls mesh behavior across services running within the environment for real-time authorization. Dr. Kainth is based in the United Kingdom.
  
• Hongli Lai. VCert is the easiest and fastest way for developers to get started with machine identity management. It was built first for Go with features added later for Java, Python and Ruby. Java is the most common enterprise language used by the Global 5000, where it’s used to develop integrations with popular DevOps applications, including Jira to Jenkins. Lai’s Indie Dev project is extending VCert to include many of the popular features needed by developers that are available in VCert Go. Lai is based in the Netherlands.
  
• Ryan Prior. It can be difficult for developers to use good security practices when establishing connections between services and users. However, security practices are particularly important for developers in designing services across clouds, external locations and their local networks. Prior’s Indie Dev project Authasaurus addresses this challenge for developers and provides a fast, easy guardian to protect and connect applications. Integrated with Venafi Trust Protection Platform and Venafi DevOpsACCELERATE, Authasaurus will automatically provision a TLS certificate at the intended ingress/exposed endpoint. Prior is based in Wisconsin.
  
• Sigurdur (Siggi) Darri Skulason. Kubernetes solves many container problems, including those that impact application deployment, scaling, management and more. However, Kubernetes does not solve problems relating to observability, traffic management, secure communications and connectivity. Service mesh implements high performance, low latency, built-in certificate authorities (CAs), but these CAs operate without oversight of InfoSec teams. This disconnect can create friction and uncertainty for InfoSec teams, who are pressured to support broad service mesh deployments. In response to these issues, Skulason is building a fast, easy source of machine identities at service mesh performance and latency. With Skulason’s In-Memory CA for service mesh, developers will have an integrated source of machine identities with Venafi policy and oversight. Skulason is based in the United Kingdom.

“As a member of the open source community, I was excited to be the first developer to join Venafi’s ‘Indie Devs’ program, which is a part of the Machine Identity Management Development Fund,” said Siggi Darri Skulason. “My project has to do with providing a fast and easy source of machine identities using an in-memory CA which integrates with Venafi solutions for policy management and oversight. I’ve really enjoyed the experience of working with the industry experts at Venafi and have benefited greatly from the financial, technical and marketing support I have had access to through this program.”

The Indie Developer Fund is a part of Venafi’s Machine Identity Management Development Fund. The Fund encourages recipients to build integrations that deliver greater visibility, intelligence and automation across any technology that creates or consumes machine identities, including:

• Cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure
• DevOps
• Containerization
• Secure Shell (SSH)
• Code signing
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics
• IoT
• Blockchain-distributed ledger technology

To find out more about the Indie Developer Fund and how you can become a funded developer, please visit: https://venafi.com/ecosystem/developer-program.

About Venafi

Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity management, securing machine-to-machine connections and communications. Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, SSH, code signing, mobile and IoT. Venafi provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise—on premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT—at machine speed and scale. Venafi puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted.

With more than 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative solutions for the world’s most demanding, security-conscious Global 5000 organizations and government agencies, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; the top four credit card issuers; three out of the top four accounting and consulting firms; four of the top five U.S. retailers; and the top four banks in each of the following countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia and South Africa. Venafi is backed by top-tier investors, including TCV, Foundation Capital, Intel Capital, QuestMark Partners, Mercato Partners and NextEquity.

For more information, visit: www.venafi.com.

Contacts

Shelley Boose

[email protected]
408.398.6987