Anthony Ricci on DigiCert’s PQC Advancements and Strategic Tech Alliances

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to another Tech Drunk tv. I am happy to introduce you to Anthony Ricci.

Anthony, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on. Thank you, Alan.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to kind of talk to you today. It's my pleasure, Anthony. Yeah, I didn't even mention you're from DigiCert, but we're going to get into that.

Um, let's, let's start off though, before we talk about DigiCert, let's talk about you a bit. Give us an idea of, you know, what your position at DigiCert is and, and maybe a little background on how you came to, to be there. Absolutely.

Yeah. So I'm, uh, the VP of Global Solutions Engineering and really kind of focused on the technical resources that we have within our organization, working with all of our customers in, in a pre and post-sales capacity. So we have a lot of interaction with a lot of our top, um, top org top organizations that we do business with on day, day in, day out basis.

My personal experience, I've been in cybersecurity since around 2007. I actually ran my own organization. I was A-S-S-L-T-L-S aggregator back in the day, integrating with all the different public s and prior to that, just in it in a variety of capacities for 32 years.

I hate to say that. So you, so you just broke into the business, you tell Me, right? Yeah, yesterday.

What behind me? Yeah, you and me both. Um, so, and that, and that's actually a great background for, to bring, to dig DigiCert as we were talking off camera.

Anthony, I think DigiCert has some of the rightest minds in the industry when it comes to quantum cryptography, when it comes to certificate technology and, and PKI and these kinds of things. I mean, really like PhD smart as heck. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. Like rocket scientists kind of people. So it's, you know, but you'd need people who also have that real go to market who understand what, what, what, what the market wants, what people need, where, where are the, where's the pain and, and that, that's an important part of it.

You know, I'm record realizing though maybe not everyone is familiar with DigiCert out here. Anthony, if you wouldn't mind, give people a, a sense of what in your own, you know, from where you sit, what's DigiCert about? So, DigiCert's about public trust and increasing our capacity to help with cryptography, uh, from a public and private perspective in a variety of different organizations.

And we're about kind of building that trust factor. It's not just about the encryption, it's about the verification and validation of the different identities that you'd either you're proving authenticating, you know, from a non PD perspective or, you know, signing and understanding kind of the different artifacts that are deployed within an organization. So we do a variety of different capacities, but, you know, foundationally, you know, PKI kind of sits there as our, um, our foundation for a variety of different use cases and workflows that we support for our, uh, or organizations across the globe.

And you mentioned it, you know, and I think it's a, it's a testament, you know, in terms of the things that we do as thought leadership within the marketplace, you know, the people that we have globally, that the footprint of the operations of DigiCert, it's second to none. You know, the, we, I'm always amazed at the people that we have and contribute to our customers to help them kind of build a, a better security posture within their organizations. Yeah, I, I agree.

And, you know, part of that, of course is staying, uh, on top of the latest developments in, in the space. And, you know, for, for DigiCert, one of the big ones is this whole post quantum cryptography issue and algorithms. And, you know, Digi, I remember interviewing people from DigiCert three to five years ago mm-hmm.

That were working with NIST as we were developing these post quantum cryptography algorithms that now we're available way before qj, way before everything else. You know, we've got this available, I feel almost obligated. I should mention we're working really closely with DigiCert on something called, I think it's the Quantum 25.

If I miss if I have it wrong, I apologize. But it's the, it's nominations are open right now for the top 25 folks in the, uh, quantum field because DigiCert is, is and will continue to be a leader in that space. And, and they're really, you know, forging ahead with this.

We're partnering with them. We're excited by it. And I'll just mention to anyone out there who knows someone who they think qualifies as a leader in the quantum space.

Go, go check that out. You can get through it on Techstrong as well as on DigiCert. Yeah.

And Alan, to, to that point, quantum Security 25 is an important aspect of kind of building that momentum within the post quantum space. And, and certainly we we're, I think they, we have until January 28th for to, you know, when there's are gonna be announced. But we want people that are gonna move the needle in the p qc space and be able to kind of support and help us have a better public interaction between different organizations.

From a crypto cryptographic perspective, p QC is a big deal. And Ellen, I've been talking to a, a number of customers and surprisingly, like I'm immersed in it every day in day out, you know, from PKI perspective, but when I go talk to organizations that haven't even really moved the needle or understand what's going on, and believe it or not, there are organizations, large ones that aren't ready. Right?

They're still, they're kind of, you know, putting their head in the ground, if you will, and not seeing some of the things that they need to do from a security perspective. So we as thought leaders within the industry need to be able to kind of, you know, enlighten them, educate them, and then bring them to a place where they can get ready. Alan, you made a a point, you know, they, you know, NIST did approve some of those, um, standards, but, you know, NIST is, was US-based, right?

So other governing bodies within the eu, you know, they're looking at other encryption algorithms as well, like classic M Mees, for example, as being something that, that the EMEA region is looking at as well. So at DigiCert, we have that visibility across the globe to kind of support our customers wherever they're doing business, whether it's, you know, stateside or in near region or in a PJ. Love it.

Excellent. Anthony, I didn't want to turn this into a, a post quantum cryptography interview. I know you are not the expert there.

We've got other things you and I need to talk about. Recently, DigiCert announced couple of key strategic relationships, partnerships, and developments. If you wouldn't mind, make our audience smart a little bit on what, what's been going on.

Absolutely. You know, as we go into this, uh, you know, like, uh, certificate, uh, validity periods are starting to shorten as well as some of the validations that have to happen from an organization perspective as well as a, a domain control perspective. And the challenge for organizations is they're still doing things manually, right?

Being able, you have like a IT operations folks that go into a server generate CSR, and people that don't know what A CSR is, a certificate sign or request. It's basically the request for a certificate and then they upload it into the system. But in a day where we have cloud native technologies, Kubernetes based deployments, you know, cross world in the cloud on premises, the proliferation of certificates is, is incredible.

It's not just one or two, it's thousands and tens of thousands. And as we shorten these validity periods where now they're about a year for public TLS, they're gonna get down to 47 days by 2029. So we need to ensure that we help our customers build these agility processes or velocity in terms of the enrollment and deployment and the binding.

So what we've done is we've made some strategic partnerships with, uh, Citrix and F five to kind of help support that velocity and help, you know, identify, uh, organizations that are using their technologies and then building solutions for them to be able to kind of push those certificates, support them, discover and certainly renew those when needed. So organizations can focus on what they're best at, whether their service or, um, products that they're building for their customers, not necessarily worried about the, uh, security aspect of it, I mean, worry about it, but bring in the right people to kind of help support that. And with these partnerships, you know, DigiCert with, uh, you know, certainly Citrix in this case and F five, we can kind of build that model to kind of help them support their businesses.

Absolutely. Look, Citrix F five, to me, those are natural partners of DigiCert because of the natures of their business and where they sit in the IAM, uh, kind of food chain, if you will. Mm-hmm.

So, Anthony, I'm recording this. We're recording this while I'm out here in Vegas at, uh, AWS reinvent. And I gotta tell you, to me, the theme out here is ai, all AI all the time, it seems, right.

How is AI specifically like with these partnerships with Citrix and F five and Digi Digi Cert, how, how is, how's AI impacting that? You know, AI is everywhere, like we were talking about earlier, and I'm surprised it's not in my ketchup bottle yet, but it will be there. Sure.

Right. It might be they just haven't told you forget. But, you know, I think, I think the, the, um, the worry, you know, from the, the space or worry in the market is like, how do we control ai?

How do we validate AI and X 5 0 9 certificates? And digital certificates are that capability to kind of drive that non repudiated identity of these agents, AI agents in particular, and DigiCert and, and we didn't mention it, but you know, we, we actually have not only PKI cyber, you know, PKI foundational products, but we are a DNS player too. We're one of the largest DNS players within the, so we have, uh, our ultra DNS solutions that give you the capabilities to do and, and to do a variety of different identity management or validation of identities.

Most people probably listening to this, um, interview will understand, you know, DNS sec, uh, operations for, you know, FQ or websites that same type of solution. And of course, we have, there's different standards. Uh, the A two A standards that are being, uh, formulated kind of support the AI model.

And we as DigiCert can support that through DNS as well as some of our PKI solutions that we have. So what's happening is, is that we're taking, you know, we're, we're on the forefront of building different models and trust models for organizations and helping them deploy these within their organizations to ensure they have the proper AI or proper models that they're supporting within their organization to support their businesses. Let me throw you one outta left field, and if you're not prepared to answer this, it's okay.

We didn't, I'm Luck handed, so I'm good. Okay. So the, the, uh, CEO of AWS yesterday said, you know, in the very near term future, like within two to three years, let's call it, um, there's gonna be billions.

I don't wanna go call Sagan on you, but billions and billions of AI agents out there. Mm-hmm. To me, I'm ready to call my DigiCert people and say, Hey, how do we, how do we certificate these AI agents?

How do I, how do I make sure this is the real AI agent and not some rogue AI agent or a a, an evil clone or something else? Man, that's a scary proposition, right? With billions of these agents running around the, it just seems like the, the potential for chaos is, and, and for e you know, for mal malware, and I don't wanna call, I don't know if you call it malware, do you call that malware?

Um, good, Right? I mean, training and inter inappropriately for to do nefarious acts. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, where do you see Digi and, and you're gonna need the f fives and the, and the Citrix's of the world. 'cause this is, is probably is bigger than any one company. Yeah.

Right. So I think when we look at, uh, the validation, the, the authenticity of the aging certificates become that, um, that model to kind of help deploy that and deploy and, you know, so I look at it as age is another aspect of, um, control that we need to support. So, you know, we talk about different appliances, applications, you know, we deploy within the clouds.

We have, you know, Kubernetes based deployments with microservices where we need to, what we call mutual authenticate, and we use certificates for that. Like I have a certificate that says, I'm Anthony Ricci. You have one that says you're Alan Shimel.

And then we have a trust, a a, a root of trust, which in this case is DigiCert or an organization's, um, root certificate that we're supporting on their behalf to prove that trust. So if we both trust the root, we can trust who we're talking to. So if we were AI agents like your Alan AI and Anthony ai, we'd certainly be a lot, probably smarter.

You and I, if we had AI agents talking on our behalf, we can have identities associated with it. So it's not only just an identity for a person or an appliance or applications. We can do identities for AI agents.

And the deployment and management is all around the protocols and industry standards that we are participating in to ensure that we have a safe deployment of those technologies. I don't know, it sounds kind of Mr. Smith out of the matrix, right?

Bill Bluefield to me in There. Oh yeah. Anthony, I wanna, we gotta kinda wrap up.

So I wanna bring it back to Citrix and F five. Where can people get more information about these partnerships? com and, uh, look up our partners, and then you'll see we have the different press releases within our website.

Please add a request and certainly we'll have a team and a a very seasoned team kind of work with you through some of those, uh, different questions that they have. Absolutely. Um, look, two good companies we work with, you know, we obviously cover both of them, so sounds like three good companies here going, going to to market together.

What could go wrong? Anthony, thanks for coming up here on Tech Trunk TV with us today while we're out in Vegas. I appreciate it.

Come back, maybe we'll do something actually, the, I know DigiCert has a bunch of their trust, uh, events going on worldwide. Maybe we'll catch you in person at one of those. That'd be great.

I usually have, I usually do some different talks about implementation and how we, I'm all about helping the customer, but thank you for having us spending the time with me today. My pleasure. I appreciate you getting on here early with us.

Anthony Ricci, uh, DigiCert here on text on tv. We're gonna take a break. We've got more.

Stay tuned.