What is Aembit?

Aembit is a cloud-native Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform. It’s derived from the word ‘ambit’ (meaning boundary or scope). Unlike traditional User IAM that focuses on human access to applications, Aembit facilitates secure interactions between automated systems or workloads. Aembit is specifically designed for managing access between workloads, or Workload IAM.

A workload is any application or program that utilizes computing resources to perform tasks. This definition includes CI/CD jobs, databases, third-party APIs, serverless functions, and custom applications. Workloads run in different environments like Kubernetes or virtual machines. Aembit primarily focuses on securing communication between these workloads over TCP/IP networks.

Traditional approaches to workload authentication rely on static credentials that are embedded in code, configuration files, or environment variables. These credentials must be manually created, rotated, and protected. This creates significant security and operational challenges.

Aembit takes a fundamentally different approach by shifting from managing static secrets to managing access based on verified workload identity and policy. This Workload IAM approach provides just-in-time, ephemeral credentials while enforcing dynamic access policies.

Unlike traditional approaches that focus on storing and managing secrets, Aembit facilitates secure interactions between automated systems by verifying workload identity and applying policy-based access controls. These include applications, services, and APIs across diverse environments using different identity types (non-human, machine, service account, and others).

How Aembit works A deeper look at how Aembit works and its architecture

→

Aembit’s core principles

Manage Access, Not Secrets - The foundational principle of Aembit is to shift the security focus from managing static credentials to managing access based on verified workload identity and policy. Instead of relying on long-lived secrets that you must store, protect, and rotate, Aembit employs mechanisms to authenticate workloads based on their intrinsic properties and environment.

Aembit grants access based on defined Access Policies and real-time context.
Zero Trust Architecture - Aembit’s identity-centric approach aligns with the principles of Zero Trust architecture, extending concepts traditionally applied to human users into the domain of non-human workloads.

Aembit never implicitly trusts access.
Least Privilege - Aembit verifies every access request based on a Client Workload’s identity, the specific resource its requesting (Server Workload), and applicable contextual constraints defined in the Access Policy. This confirms adherence to the principle of Least Privilege.

Aembit grants only the necessary permissions required for a specific task at a specific time.

What Aembit can do for you

Aembit’s value proposition centers on enhancing security and operational efficiency in managing non-human identities.

This offers specific benefits for different roles:

Build applications with secretless access

If you’re building and deploying applications, managing secrets is a common challenge. Aembit solves this by enabling a “secretless” approach for workload-to-workload access. Aembit allows your applications to dynamically obtain credentials based on their verified identity and policy, simplifying your development process by:

Removing the need to embed credentials in application code, configuration files, or environment variables.
Authenticating applications using their runtime attributes (like container signatures), removing the need for initial secrets (“secret zero” problem).
Handling authentication via network interception, so you can focus on business logic instead of auth code.

Aembit quickstart Start building with Aembit by checking out the quickstart guide

→

Advance security maturity and risk reduction

From a strategic perspective focused on risk and security maturity, Aembit provides a dedicated platform to secure non-human identities, a significant source of enterprise risk. By replacing insecure static credentials with an identity-first, secretless approach, Aembit drastically reduces the attack surface and the risk of breaches.

Aembit supports implementing a Zero Trust architecture for workloads, simplifies compliance and auditing, and offers centralized visibility and governance to advance your organization’s security maturity by:

Reducing credential exposure risk through ephemeral, Just-In-Time (JIT) access grants.
Implementing Zero Trust principles for machine-to-machine communication.
Centralizing access logs for simplified compliance reporting and incident investigation.
Providing consistent access patterns across cloud, SaaS, and on-premises resources.
Addressing the security gap in non-human workload interactions without adding developer overhead.

Aembit use cases Check out Aembit's use cases to see how it can help you

→

Enhance security posture and enforce access control

As a security engineer responsible for defining and enforcing controls, Aembit enhances your security posture by focusing on securing non-human identity access. Aembit provides centralized policy management and conditional access capabilities, enabling you to enforce granular controls based on verifiable workload identity and real-time context like security posture.

This helps implement Zero Trust principles for workloads and reduces risk by:

Verifying workload identity using concrete attributes like container signatures or cloud metadata.
Implementing fine-grained access controls based on workload context and runtime conditions.
Reducing attack surface by eliminating long-lived static credentials.
Providing standardized logging of all access attempts for troubleshooting and audit trails.
Enabling identity-based security without requiring deep security expertise from application developers.

Aembit security posture Check out Aembit's software architecture, threat model, and compliance

→

Streamline secure deployments and operations

For those focused on automating and managing infrastructure, Aembit integrates workload identity and access management directly into your operational workflows. Aembit enables you to focus on building and deploying applications through the following benefits:

Automating credential management tasks, reducing time spent on access provisioning and rotation.
Eliminating manual secret rotation workflows that distract from core development work.
Integrating with existing workloads without requiring application code changes.
Providing a Terraform provider for managing configurations and infrastructure as code.
Centralizing access management across multiple environments from a single interface.

Scaling Aembit with Terraform See how Aembit integrates with Terraform to manage your infrastructure

→

Key capabilities

The tables in the following sections detail Aembit’s primary capabilities, along with example use cases and what benefit Aembit provides for each:

Secretless workload authentication


Capability	Aembit authenticates workloads (like applications or scripts) based on their verifiable environment attributes (workload attestation) rather than relying on stored secrets like API keys or passwords.
Example Use Case	In a multicloud setup, an automated script running in an AWS EC2 instance needs to access a database hosted in Google Cloud. Instead of embedding database credentials within the script or its configuration, Aembit verifies the script’s identity based on its AWS environment attributes.
Benefit	Aembit eliminates the risk of the database credentials being exposed if the script’s code or configuration files are compromised. It also removes the operational overhead of rotating and managing those static secrets.

Conditional Access Policies


Capability	Aembit enables Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)-like controls for workloads by defining access policies that consider not just the workload’s identity but also real-time contextual factors like security posture (results from a vulnerability scan), geographical location, or time of day.
Example Use Case	A microservice responsible for processing payments is only allowed to access the production billing API if all the following are true: 1) its identity is verified, 2) a recent security scan (for example, via Snyk integration) shows no critical vulnerabilities, 3) the request originates from the expected cloud region, 4) the request originates during specific business hours.
Benefit	Aembit provides a higher level of assurance than identity alone, mimicking for non-human interactions. Aembit enables fine-grained, risk-adaptive control, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access even if a workload’s basic identity is somehow spoofed.

Identity brokering across heterogeneous environments


Capability	Aembit acts as a central intermediary, managing access requests between workloads that might reside in different environments (multiple public clouds, on-premises data centers, SaaS applications, third-party APIs).
Example Use Case	A legacy application running in an on-premises data center needs to fetch customer data from Salesforce (SaaS) and store processed results in an AWS S3 bucket (public cloud). Aembit manages the authentication and authorization for both interactions through a unified policy framework.
Benefit	It simplifies security management in complex, hybrid/multi-cloud setups by providing a single point of control and visibility, eliminating the need to configure and manage disparate access control mechanisms for each environment.

Centralized Access Policy management & auditing


Capability	Aembit provides a global system to define, enforce, and monitor access rules between all managed non-human identities. It also offers centralized logging and auditing of all access events.
Example Use Case	A security team needs to define a policy stating that only specific, approved data analytics services running in Kubernetes can access a sensitive data warehouse (like Snowflake ). They also need a consolidated audit trail of all access attempts to this data warehouse for compliance reporting.
Benefit	Centralization simplifies administration, makes sure policy enforcement is consistent across the board, and makes auditing and compliance reporting much easier compared to managing policies and logs scattered across different systems.

Automation and “No-Code Auth”


Capability	Aembit automates the process of authenticating workloads and providing them with necessary credentials just-in-time. Its interception mechanism (via Aembit Edge) aims to secure workload communication without requiring you to modify application code to handle authentication logic.
Example Use Case	A development team deploys a new microservice. Instead of writing code to handle API key retrieval and injection for accessing downstream services, they deploy Aembit Edge Components alongside their service. Aembit then: 1) automatically intercepts outgoing calls, 2) handles authentication/authorization via a central Access Policy, 3) injects credentials as needed.
Benefit	Aembit reduces developer friction, speeds up deployment cycles, and makes sure the security implementation is consistent without placing the burden of complex authentication coding on application developers. It also improves operational efficiency by automating credential lifecycle management.