Throw Away Your Passwords: Trusting Workload Identity - Ric Featherstone, ControlPlane
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2022-06-01

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Throw Away Your Passwords: Trusting Workload Identity - Ric Featherstone, ControlPlane

Trust is required to secure our systems: we need it to bootstrap infrastructure, to run workloads, and to reassure our customers of their privacy. But how do we establish and secure this "trust" in a dynamic cloud native system?

Historically we relied upon identifiers such as IP addresses, passwords, and certificates, but can we do better than these antiquated authentication mechanisms? In this talk we:

    Demystify machine identity and its relationship to secrets management and access control
    Discuss the issues with historical approaches in a cloud native environment
    Solve the "bottom turtle" trust bootstrap quandary
    Appraise the open source implementations and technologies available to you
    Demonstrate practical examples of how to acquire a workload identity or secret zero
    Strive for a world in which passwords and static keys are replaced by dynamic credentials and hardware roots of trust