The identity layer behind modern infrastructure.

A machine identity is the credential a non-human entity — a server, service, application, device, container, or workload — uses to authenticate and communicate securely. In practice, machine identities are largely TLS certificates and cryptographic keys.

Humans authenticate with passwords, MFA, and single sign-on. Machines authenticate with certificates, keys, and tokens — issued, rotated, and revoked programmatically and at far greater scale.

Cloud computing, microservices, containers, and service meshes mean every workload needs its own identity. As a result, machine identities now vastly outnumber human ones in most organizations.

Unmanaged or expired machine identities cause outages and create security gaps. As machines become the dominant identity type, managing them well is essential to both reliability and security.

Certificates are the most common form of machine identity. Managing machine identities is, to a large degree, managing the certificate lifecycle — discovery, monitoring, and automated renewal.

Mutual TLS and Kubernetes service meshes assign certificate-based identities to services, generating large volumes of short-lived machine identities that must be automated.

Shorter certificate lifetimes mean machine identities rotate even more frequently, making automated issuance, renewal, and discovery a hard requirement.

MachineCert discovers every certificate-based machine identity across public, cloud, and internal systems, maps their relationships and ownership, monitors risk and expiry, and automates renewal — giving organizations control over their machine identity layer.