Articles about

Machine Identities and Secrets

Stop Configuring mTLS. Start Describing Your Network

Configuring PKI automations and mTLS is a painful trial and eorror process for DevOps and Platform teams. But it is also not Zero Trust. The trus of workloads are not vetted in a PKI automation like thay are for the root domain. The automation is focused on speed to establish TLS/mTLS and not trust or security. There's an alternative designed to meet today's threat enviornment and tomorrow's.

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Tom McNamara

June 11, 2026

When Identity Is the Blast Radius

Recent cyberattacks reveal a fatal flaw in enterprise security: relying on centralized human identity providers (IdPs) for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. When threat actors use cheap infostealer malware to bypass the perimeter, they weaponize static credentials to execute lateral movement, paralyzing critical business logic and the IT/OT boundary. True Zero Trust architecture requires decoupling human identity from machine identity. This article explores how Automated Moving Target Defense (AMTD) and workload security proxies eliminate static secrets. By enforcing cryptographic isolation and eradicating policy debt, organizations can secure M2M trust and protect their application networks against catastrophic credential-based breaches.

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Tom McNamara

March 31, 2026

The Complexity Tax for Platform Engineers and DevOps

Platform Engineers and DevOps teams are struggling with the 'service mesh' model because of massive overhead, extreme complexity, and a steep learning curve. The articles proposes a lightweight, simpler, and more integrated decentralized solution to the problem that is currently their biggest headache. They don't need the complexity of a full-blown service mesh to secure east-west traffic. The Hopr WoSP delivers the same workload-to-workload authorization without the YAML hell, and without the massive operational overhead.

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Tom McNamara

November 14, 2025

What Does Hopr Replace In An Enterprise Security Architecture?

Innovative solutions can often challenge conventional thinking. Conventional cyber defenses such as API Security, Firewalls, Gateways, and others exist to filter out "bad stuff" before it reaches the digital engine of your business - your application workloads and data. This article helps CISOs understand the value of the WoSP through the analogy of an automobile engine with three conventional filters.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

AI and the Crisis of Machine Credentials (and How to Avoid It)

Machines [also known as Non-Human Identities (NHI)] that operate within and across enterprises is exploding. Led by the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, these machines represent a significant risk to enterprises. The combination of static secrets, ungoverned NHIs, and autonomous AI agents is creating a perfect storm of complexity, risk, and visibility gaps. Organizations that wait for a breach before acting will find themselves overwhelmed. But those who act now — embracing ephemeral credentials, zero-trust principles, and machine-native identity security — will emerge stronger, more resilient, and future-ready.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

Redefining Multi-Cloud Application Networking with a Workload Security Proxy

Most enterprises operate with applications in different cloud environments and may even be part of a digital ecosystem that shares application data with third party organizations. But conventional credential management make this a complicated and vulnerable task. Hopr.co's Workload Security Proxy is a solution that simplifies and secures multi-cloud application networks.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

Why TLS 1.3 and Automated PKI Fall Short of Zero Trust Principles

Enterprises running sensitive business operations in the cloud confront difficult security and privacy challenges. One of them is data loss prevention. While it's true that cloud providers do offer experienced security professionals and tools, it is not true that cybersecurity will be stronger. This article explains some of the reasons why CISOs and security professionals need to take a close look at their application networks and cloud infrastructure. The good news is that innovative solutions to overcome the vulnerabilities and gaps exist and are easy to adopt and implement.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

Machine Identity - Avoid the Crisis

Machines operating across the Internet outnumber humans by a ratio of three-to-one. This will rise dramatically as more Internet of Things (IOT) devices arrive. Existing approaches for managing identity and trust for a massive number of machines rely on centralized and legacy solutions that won't work for the machine era. A decentralized solution capable of speed, trust, and agility is needed to avoid a crisis and enable a graceful transition to high trust machine identities.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

IAM in a Box

Containers are an important part of modern cloud engineering. They evoke the idea of portability and relocation. But in the cloud this is often inhibited because they become anchored to external services within a particular cloud environment, and it becomes difficult to relocate them to a different environment. This article describes how containers can be freed and portability restored.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

An Unintentional Secret - Automated TLS and its Zero Trust Fallacy

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its companion, mutual TLS (mTLS) are stalwart security protocols known for encrypting communications over the Internet. When they are applied to root domains (such as is the case for Web domains and browsers) they represent identity trust. However when they are implemented with automated PKI certificates, they lose an important security quality: identity trust. Due to the speed and scale of cloud automation, the intermediate certificate authorities that issue PKI certificates eliminate vetting of the receiving identity (a containerized workload).

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

Machine Identity - Who’s Who in the Cloud?

Identities for machines operating in the cloud, like humans in the natural world, are an important quality that is essential to trust, authorization, and authentication. Machines are identified by cryptographic material that takes the form of a certificate. But in the cloud, it is challenging to find, track, and manage the many certificates that are dynamically assigned and used. New approaches to managing machine identities in a zero trust cloud environment are needed to realize secure business operations in the cloud.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

Keeping Secrets Is Hard

Keeping secrets is hard because they have to stay secret to deliver security. And for machines and workloads in the cloud the consequences to lost secrecy can ripple through the entire business and bring down many digital operations in an instant. Leakage of digital secrets occurs almost naturally over time; disclosure eventually happens and secrecy is lost. But the risk of lost secrecy and the impact to cloud operations is minimized with the right tools.

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Tom McNamara

June 5, 2025

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Hopr provides true Zero Trust access control for workloads and APIs, powered by a Cloud Native Automated Moving Target Defense.

We use ephemeral machine identities, credential hopping, and application-layer post quantum end-to-end encryption of data in transit.

And Hopr verifies identity trust at every API transaction and eliminates the risks from static credentials across clouds, clusters, and organizations.

And Hopr's novel Korvette-S Workload Security Proxy (WoSP) is simple and fast to deploy into a Zero Trust application network using a FREE Lane7 Blueprint.
Copyright 2021-2026 | Hopr Corporation
CHIPS™, MAID™, SEE™, and Cloud Native AMTD™
are protected by US Patents and patents pending.