Fletcher Heisler

We recently updated our list of upcoming Enterprise features to more accurately reflect the requests we’ve been hearing from our customers and community. One of the changes you may notice: we are no longer spending precious cycles on brainstorming ways to inject AI into our product and user experience.

We had briefly considered ways that “AI” and specifically LLMs might enhance our platform, including an AI-based risk assessment option, as you see below on the left in our previous Enterprise features list. On reflection, we realized we could probably get most of the way to the same outcome with some custom expression templates and a few if statements, begging the question of whether it was worth the effort to pursue at all. So on our current website, you'll no longer see that mention of AI.

We did not want to push a feature just for the sake of being able to say we are AI-powered.

As a Public Benefit Company, authentik is dedicated to open source software development and to our community, and to continuously developing, providing, and maintaining secure, stable authentication solutions.

We are pleased to share our first Public Benefit Company (PBC) report with you, our community, our users, our contributors, and everyone who invests their time and effort into open source software for the good of us all.

Read on for details about our chartered commitments, the work we do to support these commitments, and how the results of the report show that we are on the right path.

Public Benefit Companies are a relatively new form of business entity, and are not limited to software companies. Two of the best known PBCs are the clothing brand Patagonia and the ice cream maker Ben & Jerry's. For any PBC the core focus is, of course, providing a benefit to others beyond themselves, as well as operating with transparency, accountability, and purpose.

PBCs (no matter their field or product) must act in the best interests of the community and consciously understand how their actions will affect others. For authentik specifically, we consider our work in the light of benefiting:

• users and community members who implement and rely on our products
• individuals or companies who contributed to or invested in authentik
• the security and stability of broader systems and environments
• the team members of the company

The benefits to us of being a PBC include attracting like-minded developers with the skills to continuously propel the project forward in the community as well as promoting trust from the community in our ongoing responsibility to the open source project.

In the annual or biennial report, PBCs typically provide a description and explanation of how the benefit company provided a general and/or specific public benefit, as well as which actions and methods they used to deliver and maintain the benefit.

Authentik Security’s stated public benefit purpose is to maintain an open-source platform for the benefit of the public.

In October 2023, Cloudflare announced that they had discovered yet another Okta compromise.

Cloudflare had to warn Okta first and show them how they had been breached via an insecure setup with a third-party service provider. A leading company offering security and identity as a service instead introduced insecurity.

Over the past decade or so, SaaS has become the dominant model for delivering software, and yet, such incidents aren’t surprising. The SaaS business model was supposed to align vendor and customer interests, while the technology allowed rapid updates and improvements. SaaS was supposed to bring an end to throwing software over the wall and letting customers deal with it.

Recently, however, we’ve seen many companies fleeing SaaS providers to build private clouds and run self-hosted software. At Authentik Security, we have seen more and more customers canceling legacy SaaS providers to take back control of their identity needs with our self-hosted solution.

At first glance, it looks like people are going back in time, but self-hosted software has advanced despite the popularity of SaaS and is increasingly likely to beat SaaS options across numerous measures. In this post, I’ll walk through why the industry defaults have changed and why we believe in focusing on a self-hosted product.

The XZ backdoor incident spooked a lot of people. Not all PRs are innocent—even from long-standing contributors—and this one would have created a backdoor in a utility included in almost all Linux distributions, had it not been caught.

But “open source = more vulnerable to exploits” is the wrong takeaway—being open source can actually be an advantage for security-focused products.

Hello world! I'm excited to be joining Authentik Security as CEO. I wanted to take this opportunity to share the experience of my first week with the community and a bit about my background.

At the start of my very first "official" day on the job, I got an overview of the various applications we use from Jens, our founder and CTO. If you have ever been through a company onboarding process, you know that it might take a few days up to a couple weeks to get access to everything, sometimes even longer. In a small and agile startup, that might be as little as a day if you're lucky.