eWeek | November 20, 2018
Cyber-security accelerator Team8 is helping to launch Portshift, in an effort to provide a new form of application identity-based security. Assigning identity to applications has long been a challenge for organizations, and it's one that startup Portshift is looking to help solve. Portshift officially launched on Nov. 20, backed by Israeli cyber-security accelerator Team8 and $5.3 million in seed funding. Portshift's core technology uses digital signing techniques within the development and deployment phase to validate and authenticate applications, in an effort to improve security. "We believe that it's time for a new paradigm shift when talking about the application security in the cloud," Ran Ilany, Portshift’s CEO and founder, told eWEEK. "What we're doing is building a method, a solution which intertwines security and operations together, essentially from the get-go, from the CI/CD, the very beginning of the development life cycle." Team8 is led by Nadav Zafir, former commander of Israel's Technology and Intelligence Unit 8200, which is similar in many respects to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and was founded in 2013. In a 2016 interview with eWEEK, Zafrir defined Team8 as a cyber-security foundry that creates new companies to fill perceived gaps in the marketplace. Among the companies that Team8 has created are Illusive Networks, Claroty and Hysolate. Ilany said that the way Portshift works is via APIs that integrate with any continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) system. CI/CD systems, including Jenkins and Jira among numerous others, are used by developers to build and deploy applications. With Portshift, application identities are generated through CI/CD with information embedded within the system, Ilany said. The embedded identity information can define where a given application is allowed to run and what other services the application is allowed to communicate with.
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