Identity-native Infrastructure Access Management: Preventing Breaches by Eliminating Secrets and Adopting Zero Trust

Traditional secret-based credentials can't scale to meet the complexity and size of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Today's applications are spread across a diverse range of clouds and colocation facilities, as well as on-prem data centers. Each layer of this modern stack has its own attack vectors and protocols to consider.

How can you secure access to diverse infrastructure components, from bare metal to ephemeral containers, consistently and simply? In this practical book, authors Ev Kontsevoy, Sakshyam Shah, and Peter Conrad break this topic down into manageable pieces. You'll discover how different parts of the approach fit together in a way that enables engineering teams to build more secure applications without slowing down productivity.

With this book, you'll learn:

• The four pillars of access: connectivity, authentication, authorization, and audit
• Why every attack follows the same pattern, and how to make this threat impossible
• How to implement identity-based access across your entire infrastructure with digital certificates
• Why it's time for secret-based credentials to go away
• How to securely connect to remote resources including servers, databases, K8s Pods, and internal applications such as Jenkins and GitLab
• Authentication and authorization methods for gaining access to and permission for using protected resources

Ev Kontsevoy is Co-Founder and CEO of Teleport. An engineer by training, Kontsevoy launched Teleport in 2015 to provide other engineers solutions that allow them to quickly access and run any computing resource anywhere on the planet without having to worry about security and compliance issues. A serial entrepreneur, Ev was CEO and co-founder of Mailgun, which he successfully sold to Rackspace. Prior to Mailgun, Ev has had a variety of engineering roles. He holds a BS degree in Mathematics from Siberian Federal University, and has a passion for trains and vintage-film cameras.

Sakshyam Shah is a cybersecurity architect by profession and currently an engineer at Teleport. Besides cybersecurity, he loves to read and write about indie hackers, bootstrapped businesses, and early-stage venture funding.

Peter Conrad is an author, artist, and technical content strategist with experience ranging from consumer electronics and telecommunications to IoT and enterprise software.