What Does Passwordless, Keyless, and Defensive Cybersecurity Mean?

Imagine a world where you don't need keys to your car or home. Your car lets you in every time you approach it, and the door to your home swings open when you touch the door handle.

The doors don't open for anyone else but you and only when you want them to open. They also shut close as soon as you enter. If you wish, you can grant temporary access to trusted people, like your neighbor who wants to borrow your car for an hour on a given day. The car door will only open for your neighbor at the time that you specified, and the car will only be available for driving for a certain time period, which you specified again.

The passwordless, keyless, defensive cybersecurity approach (Zero Trust) works similarly. It is an approach to access management of applications and environments vital to you. For example, remote access to the control room of a power plant, access to a piece of operational technology machinery that requires maintenance, or access to an internal data repository.

Of course, in everyday life, it is not yet possible to fully achieve the same level of security in access management, but in the cyber world, these solutions are already available.

Never trust, always verify

Zero Trust is a rigorous approach to cybersecurity that requires any person or device accessing a private network to be identified and authorized, whether they are inside or outside the network. Unlike other security models, which automatically trust people and devices that are already in the network, Zero Trust does not trust anyone at any point.

With Zero Trust, your access is automated and role-based – this is known as Just-in-Time (JIT) access. JIT allows you to make all access to your digital infrastructure temporary by default. You can also check the validity of each user, connection, role, and the level of privileges at the time of establishing the connection repeatedly.

This security framework requires all users to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated before gaining or retaining access. This way, all access rights are automatically authenticated, and no passwords or keys are needed.

Think outside of the box. You don't need ever-changing passwords and keys. And you don’t need staff and complex systems to use, manage, and store passwords and keys. Enter your house or car just in time whenever needed and grant access only to those whose role allows it, for example, your cat.

Become keyless and passwordless with SSH

Do you have thousands of end users of your systems? Do you have thousands of passwords and keys whose owners or users are constantly changing? Do you know how many keys your applications use or how many different passwords you have?

Let's talk about how to get your access management under control and how you can become truly Zero Trust with a passwordless, keyless, and defensive cybersecurity approach.

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