The world is experiencing a digital transformation that is eclipsing all previous technological advancements. As more IT workloads move to the cloud, and as more IT services are containerized, they all need to be authenticated using cryptographic keys and digital certificates, or machine identities. Given the pace and scale of this new world of machines, protecting those machine identities is becoming increasingly critical to security. Although these changes affect every business, many organizations use outdated methods to protect the exponentially rising number of machine identities they now require. Those approaches simply can’t keep up.
How does this impact the security of code? There are many types of machine identities — TLS, SSH, mobile and more — that are used on many types of machines. When you look at it in this light, code is the ultimate "machine" that requires an authorized identity so that we can trust it. That is precisely why machine identities are so critical to the code signing process.