An enterprise secrets management platform providing fine-grained policy control, machine identity authentication, and audit trails for DevOps pipelines and workloads in regulated industries.
CyberArk Conjur provides enterprise-grade secrets management with fine-grained policy control and detailed audit trails, built for organizations in regulated industries that need governance over machine identity access to credentials. Conjur supports workload identity through methods including JWT-based authentication, which reduces reliance on static bootstrap credentials compared to simpler vault patterns. The gap that remains is at the runtime enforcement layer: Conjur stores and releases secrets, but it does not attest workload identity cryptographically at the network layer, enforce conditional access policies based on workload posture or context, or inject credentials transparently without application code. Aembit operates at that layer: it attests the workload’s identity, enforces policy at access time, and delivers short-lived credentials directly into the request without the workload ever holding them. For use cases where Conjur remains in the stack, Aembit integrates with it as a credential source, adding the policy and attestation layer that Conjur was not designed to provide.
For workload and agent authentication, Aembit replaces CyberArk Conjur because:
– Conjur requires workloads to authenticate and retrieve secrets before they can use them. Aembit injects credentials directly at the network layer at the moment of access, so the workload never holds a secret and developers never write credential retrieval code.
– Even with JWT-based machine identity, Conjur-retrieved secrets persist in the workload’s runtime environment after retrieval. Aembit credentials are short-lived and exist only for the duration of the request.
– Conjur does not enforce conditional access policies based on workload posture, time of day, or geographic context at the moment of the downstream request. Aembit enforces these conditions at access time.
– Conjur requires application code or a sidecar to retrieve and manage secrets. Aembit’s injection model is transparent to the application: no SDK, no retrieval logic, no changes to existing code.
– Conjur audit logs record secret retrieval events but do not provide the end-to-end workload attribution that cryptographic attestation produces. Aembit’s logs record which attested workload accessed what resource and under which policy, meeting SOC 2 and NIST SP 800-207 requirements directly.
Aembit can integrate with CyberArk Conjur as a credential source in environments where Conjur manages secrets that workloads need to access. Organizations running both get:
– Cryptographic attestation on top of Conjur access. Aembit attests the requesting workload’s identity before allowing any Conjur credential retrieval, adding a layer of enforcement that Conjur does not provide natively.
– Conditional enforcement. Aembit’s access policies can restrict which workloads can retrieve which Conjur secrets, under what posture conditions, and within what time windows.
– A unified audit trail. Aembit logs which attested workload triggered the Conjur access, when, and under what policy, supplementing Conjur’s own audit data with workload-level attribution for compliance evidence.
– An incremental migration path. Organizations can govern new workloads and AI agents through Aembit while existing Conjur-dependent systems continue running unchanged.
Resources:
Integration guide
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