Protecting Machine Identities: USPTO and Certificate Automation
summary
USPTO automates certificate lifecycle with Venafi TPP as its command center in Azure, discovering about 10,000 servers (85% found initially) and integrating with AWS, GCP, Okta, ServiceNow, QRadar, Splunk and Entrust plus an internal CA. Manual workflows took ~10 hours per certificate, causing eight incidents in 2022–23 and ~200 hours of outage; automation cuts annual operational cost from multi‑millions toward ~$50k, enables phased moves to 90‑day and then 30‑day certificates, and reached ~85% coverage after a year.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:46USPTO chose automation
- 3:12USPTO’s zero trust mandate
- 5:43Manual certificate risks
- 9:19Certificate lifecycle governance
- 13:13Technology and governance at USPTO
- 17:33Lessons from managing complexity
- 21:51Exception management and policy
- 25:28Overcoming adoption resistance
- 30:04Training for automation
- 33:01ROI of certificate automation
- 36:37Foundation for growth
- 38:06FY25 lifecycle plans
- 41:18Q&A
related talks
14mAutomated (PKI) Infrastructure: The AI You Should Be Thinking About
13mAutomating PKI: Paddy Power Betfair's Journey with Vault
32mPractical Insights from Following NIST SP 1800-38B
07mEstablishing Digital Trust
27mAddressing the growing threat of non-human identities with PKI
06mKeynote: Ten Years as a Free, Open, and Automated Certificate Authority
24mChaos to Control: Automating the Identity Life Cycle in the Cloud
30mTrust Engineering: Building Security Leadership at Early-Stage...