Defakto Joins OpenID Foundation to Help Eradicate Long-Lived Credentials for Non-Human Identities

Defakto is helping set the standard for secure, interoperable non-human identity and access without long-lived credentials

PALO ALTO, Calif. – October 20, 2026 – Defakto Security, the non-human identity and access management company for the enterprise, has joined the OpenID Foundation as a Sustaining Corporate Member alongside Cisco, Okta, and other technology leaders to shape the future of open identity standards.

Defakto’s complete Non-Human IAM platform unifies identity, access, discovery, and governance across the NHI lifecycle, helping global enterprises eradicate long-lived secrets and overprivileged accounts in favor of short-lived, cryptographically verifiable identities that reduce risk, simplify compliance, and securely scale automation.

“Every layer of automation creates more non-human identities that need access,” said Danny Oliveri, Co-Founder and CEO of Defakto Security. “AI is dramatically accelerating that trend and making the limitations of long-lived credentials impossible to ignore. Workloads and agents should be able to establish verifiable identity at runtime and securely access the resources they need without creating new identity silos or proliferating more secrets.”

Defakto’s participation in the OpenID Foundation builds on years of leadership in open identity standards. Built on SPIFFE, OAuth and OpenID Connect, and emerging standards such as WIMSE. Defakto’s platform extends standards-based identity across infrastructure, applications, automation and AI without introducing another proprietary identity layer.

“The OpenID Foundation continues to build momentum by driving adoption of existing standards and defining new specifications to address emerging needs. Defakto’s membership highlights the importance of open standards for workload and agentic identity, and we welcome its contribution,” said OpenID Foundation board member Atul Tulshibagwale.

“Defakto is proud to join the OpenID Foundation and deepen our contribution to the open identity community,” said Pieter Kasselman, VP of Open Standards at Defakto Security. “AI is accelerating the need for a unified non-human identity layer, and our customers are building it on open standards. We look forward to helping shape a scalable, secure identity fabric for the agentic age.”

Defakto puts open standards to work across some of the world’s largest and most complex organizations in retail, financial services, technology, semiconductors and other industries. At one of the world’s largest retailers alone, more than 12,000 applications rely on Defakto identities.