Cisco announces the acquisition of Astrix Security, a company specializing in Non-Human Identity (NHI) Security. With this acquisition, Cisco aims to help organizations better secure and manage AI agents and machine identities. Astrix’s capabilities will be integrated into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Cisco Secure Access, and Duo.
Astrix Security has been working with API keys, service accounts, and OAuth tokens for about five years now. These are precisely the credentials that AI agents use today to access corporate systems and perform tasks.
The platform maps an organization’s agent-based AI activity, manages the full lifecycle of NHI’s from provisioning to decommissioning, and detects threats (such as compromised credentials and out-of-scope actions by agents). Secrets Management, centralized management of vaults in the cloud, is also part of the package.
Integration into the Cisco platform
Cisco plans to integrate Astrix’s features into Cisco Identity Intelligence, providing greater visibility and context regarding identities within the security platform. Additionally, NHI capabilities will be extended to Cisco Secure Access and Duo Identity and Access Management. This enables customers to discover, authenticate, and authorize agentic identities, and to detect and respond to threats.
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