hardware-attestation
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Mike Malone Wants Your Passwords to Expire - Permanently
A sixth-grade C programmer turned a basement full of second-hand servers into a career-long argument: trust should live in cryptography, not in another password someone can copy.
Smallstep
Smallstep is a San Francisco cybersecurity company building the first hardware-backed device identity platform. Founded in 2016 by Mike Malone, it grew out of the widely used open-source step-ca project - a private certificate authority and ACME server - and now sells enterprises a way to bind access to Wi-Fi, VPNs, SaaS apps and SSH to verified hardware. Its co-developed ACME Device Attestation standard, built with Google at the IETF, uses hardware co-processors to stop credential theft, phishing and impersonation. Smallstep has raised $26M and was a 2025 RSAC Innovation Sandbox top-10 finalist.