Amit Sinha, DigiCert | RSA Conference 2023

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone, we're back. We're live here at the RSA conference.

It's early in the morning 9 o'clock, but sessions have started and Keynotes are happening and the people are going about their business. I am really happy to be joined here by I'll make sure I get this I'm gonna do my best. I'm at Sinha.

You got it. I'm in Sinha CEO of digicer. First of all, I'm it.

Hey, man, welcome to text you on TV. This is your first time on we're pleased to have you we of course we've been covering did you say? For as long as I've been doing that strong TV, so but this is your first visit on here.

We're pleased to have you on Alan. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me night.

My pleasure. So I met before. We in the digest our business.

Let's hear a little bit about your background. Yeah. Well, I've been in the security industry for about 20 years.

Prior to digit I was president at zscaler. I was there for 12 years. I still am on the board of directors at zscaler prior to that.

I was the CTO of air defense wireless security company. It's been in this industry and it's a pleasure to see how the RSA conference has grown and it's a really tight knit community. It's good to be back.

It's good to be bad. We were here last year. Wasn't quite the same.

It is it's it's amazing to be back. I like you. I'm here 20 something years and yes, it is good to be back.

Let's start to digit. Look our audience. As I said, we've been covering did you search forever?

But our audience is a cyber audience devops? Cloud native they don't need a introduction to certificates. Yeah encryption pki but I think Did some confusion well, what exactly is did you sir?

Where did they I know they're in that sort of certificate business. But where exactly did they play? How would you describe it to them?

Yeah. Well broad Strokes, right? Well, they just said, you know, we're we're the leaders in digital trust right now.

That's a big word. What is digital trust, you know, it's kind of foundational infrastructure that make sure that when businesses and individuals interact online, they can do that with confidence right? Whether these are transactions or content, you know, you want you want you want them to be authentic right?

And that's that's the core business of digicide. Our roots are in pki and digital certificates, right? So, you know, when you go to your banking website or anything online, you see the little lock icon the digital identity through digital certificates has been provided by digital and over 80% of Fortune.

It customers use digisort or we have customers in 180 countries. So think of us as sort of the invisible Plumbing on the internet that is making sure that all the transactions interactions in content is is encrypted and authentic absolutely and then you do it. Well, we do it well with an added for 20 years.

Absolutely. Here's the issue though. Sometimes when you do it, so well.

And as you said, it's part of that digital Plumbing. People take it for granted they do. And no one wants to be taken for granted.

No one should be but it's it's such an important piece that we don't think about until something breaks. Right? Well and then we take you know recently I saw a tweet from Elon Musk and he said hey starlink is down, right and that was because of an expired digital certificate and you hear about a Google having outages or Microsoft having outages, you know, when we pull our customers we found that two thirds have had a digital certificate related outage on a critical system in the past one year right now certificates expire now every year, right and validity periods are shrinking.

So if you talk to any large organizations, you know, they might have thousands sometimes millions of these certificates across users devices workloads and being able to manage it effect. Early is very important. Right?

Otherwise, it's like Plumbing, you know, you don't realize till it breaks your floods your house, right? They got a problem. Yeah.

So I think the three big problems that our customers routinely see us solving for them one, you know, obviously, we provide the digital trust fabric, but we reduce the risk of outages because it's properly managed with our trust life cycle management solution second, you know, they reduce the attack surface and and you know and Associated data loss that's a big problem and third I think, you know, just the basic notion of trust in a service right and you'll find that and we did this survey and we found that about 47% of end users will change their vendor when they when they find that they're not trustworthy anymore. Right? So, you know, so I think reducing outages the ability to reduce attacks surfaces and improving user trust in Digital Services.

Another area for me. I think people think of City, you know, when you look at stuff from 500,000, right? You don't see the wrinkles.

You don't see a lot of features kind of little looks homogeneous. Yeah, and people say All right. Did you search certificate another company certificate?

It's all using. Yeah technology. This expired maybe I'll go with this one.

as you sit here, what are the What did the defining sort of features or characteristics on why people should care right which certificate Bender which digital trust vendor? That's a greater working hour. It's a great question.

Look. The math is common to everyone pki has existed for a while. The question is can you come up with a platform that can address specific use cases and solutions so I'll give you maybe a couple of examples right?

So we have now leading medical device manufacturers who want to make sure that you know, critical devices like glucose monitors and infusion pumps are are tamper resistant and they're communication is secure right now. It can be done beautifully with pki so, you know, you have a device that has now iPhone like security, you know, it boots up. It has a certificate for a digital identity the software that gets installed on it is signed by digicert so that you know, you can't jail break it right.

So you kind of start getting iPhone like Security on these iot devices now, It is all pki and its certificates what has digital done. We have a digital one platform that really integrates well into things like manufacturing lines and the requirements for flexibility around certificates the ability to issue a batch of say a million and you know load up a factory right to be able to print these out become important. How do I do over the air updates?

How do I manage all of that? That's like one example another example that got me very excited was, you know, a large nation in in Asia recently ran their entire elections right using digit digit and I mean think about pki-based digital identity for all your citizens think about your ballots being electronic documents that that are Temple resistant, right? And so elections are fast.

They're you know, you can't repudiate them. There's no let's recount. Paid and it's all based on strong cryptography and chain of trust.

So Being able to do these types of use cases in a seamless way. It's the application of pki and cryptography asserts assert, right? So that's that's one area and then you know in the core Enterprise, I'll go back to certificate life cycle management, right?

As you know, these secret durations are getting shorter and shorter right recently. We did a public webinar with IBM one of our customers and they have 10 million certificates right now imagine and this is across users devices, you know, ephemeral workloads, right? How do I manage all of that from Discovery?

Right? What are the crypto algorithms are they vulnerable? When is this expiring to to automation?

Yeah and scaling right? So it's not just search. It's the whole fast and solutions and I think that that right it's not just issuing this that's easy, right?

Look, we were talking off camera. There's a few issues out here that have the potential to really shake this business up. One Quantum Computing.

Absolutely well, look everyone thinks Quantum is you know in the next five or ten years and The recent Time Magazine cover in February was all about Quantum Computing. Right? I think IBM recently talked about a 400 Cubit quantum computer, right and I saw a paper that popped up by some Chinese researchers that claimed right and you know experts have said they might be dubious.

They can crack RSA 2048 bit with 372 cubits. Now they didn't have access to such a computer and you know experts will tell you well. There are some flaws in the algorithm but here's the here's the here look at it.

This isn't yeah. This isn't like a white one day like thing, you know, the exact date is gonna happen, right? It's not if it's right.

It's when and it's going to be sudden right and it's it could be an extinction level event because suddenly well, it's not just that now I can't communicate securely using traditional ciphers and TLS one dot two or one dots. We you know, what about my iPhone backup. So what about my cloud story?

Everything is up for everything? Your programs. Yeah, what about the electronic document you sign?

Right? Can someone compare it and resign it, right? So I get it all of those, you know our big problems and I think where most of our Progressive customers are are making way is getting ready in the form of you know, let's step one.

I need an inventory right? I need to know what kind of certificates and crypto assets are deployed one of my crown jewels, right and then step two is automation. So if I if I have to swap, you know, 100,000 of these will I be doing one at a time, right?

Yeah, that's one aspect. And of course there's a bigger component on infrastructure, right, you know will my you know, caviar SSL accelerator to be with a lattice algorithm. That's Quantum proof.

Right? And so I mean, that's a big big a lot of people say, oh well just come up with the quantum algorithm. I don't think that's the answer necess.

It's the whole thing right agreed agreed. So we've got quantum. Now we also have ai.

Mm-hmm another another big kind of question mark out there. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean there's a lot of talk around AI particularly with Chad GPT, right? I think look from a security perspective. I think content provenance will become a a big issue like, you know, you're recording this this video and well, how do I know?

It was legit? Right? Did someone deep fake it right when she want to sign it as text wrong and don't you want your messaging clients to be able to tell a little Holograms?

Yeah. We're on it. Right you want to say?

Hey, this is authentic Allen text wrong and your clients are validating that otherwise, you know, it's it's trivial these days to produce fake news produce fake images, right? So generative AI is just gonna make these things easier and People won't know what's real and what's what's made up. And so the ability to say this is the authentic source of it.

And that's through cryptography. Right you sign your content today digital is signing documents and signing software. But tomorrow, you know, you're yeah, it could be images and multimedia and video and everyone make sure that every kid it's all up for grabs.

We're almost out of time. But on it, you know, one of the highlights is the digits are using conference is always and I'm hoping it'll be back now with yeah person. Yeah.

Yeah, we're looking at the hosting a digit digital trust user conference in Fall. Please check out our website and you'll get more information around it. It's a good opportunity for pki cryptography digital trust experts to meet and you'll see lots of customers share their use cases and stories there.

com? com actually, thank you so much for coming. Thanks Alex.

You guys. All right armit sinhard CEO. com?

This change is coming the changes of foot right? We're gonna take a break. We're here in RSA.

We'll be back in a minute. Thank you. All right.

Bye.