“So what do you do?”
For years, my usual response has been that my work is the most boring cocktail conversation you can imagine. Explaining why PKI is even a solution to a problem takes more time than we usually allot to hearing about someone else’s job.
After the listener chuckled at my joke, I may have said something like “You know how your connection to a banking or shopping website is secure? I help make that happen.”
That’s partly true, or it least it was partly true when I still worked at AWS. But even then, a lot of my time was spent helping teams use PKI to secure internal communication, well away from direct customer interaction.
From the outside, it’s hard to visualize that Amazon or Uber are not singular websites, but are composed of hundreds, if not thousands of individual software applications maintained separately by teams of people. From the outside, it’s just one big machine. Speaking of its component parts is like referring to spirits. On the whole, they’re not something you can touch or see in the same way. They’re ghosts in the machine.
When companies or institutions are hacked or held for ransom, chances are the attackers have taken advantage of weak links within the system. Starting with the initial entry, they move laterally from system to system until they get the level of access or data they need. “Attackers think in graphs.”
Now that I’ve joined SPIRL I’m focused far more on those individual components, and how they identify themselves to each other. As abstract as they seem to outsiders, they have real effects both within the overall system and in the world outside of it. In a sense, my job is about giving passports to the ghosts in the machine. These individual systems are given documents they use to prove their identities before they’re allowed to do anything. It’s not the only tool we use to stop an attacker, but it goes a long way.