Certificates that renew themselves.
Evangelos is our certificate orchestration platform. It takes people out of the certificate management lifecycle: it tracks every certificate you own, renews it, deploys it and records everything it does in a tamper-evident audit log. Nobody needs to know or operate OpenSSL. Keys are governed by policy as code. They are made on the target, or by Evangelos through our secrets management platform and handed over once, through a single-use wrapped token. Run it yourself, or we run it for you in Canada or the EU.
An independent lab for the hard problems in security.
Our interest is the foundations of security: public key infrastructure, digital trust, secrets management, the constructs everything else depends on. We do security research and reverse engineering, down to firmware, hardware and the cryptography itself. Where no good answer exists yet, we make one. Where one exists but has aged, we remake it, smaller and better. We build what we use, we publish how we test, and we sell no one else's products.
One inventory. Every certificate. Every CA.
Evangelos is built on lessons learned at Netflix and Wayfair. Our founders set out to remove the friction that difficult, often opaque cryptographic processes put in the way of DevOps velocity, and the mistakes those processes invite. Evangelos is the culmination of those efforts: certificate orchestration, solved elegantly and completely.
API first
Evangelos is an orchestration platform, and everything it does is an API call, described in OpenAPI. Pipelines, Terraform, Ansible and ACME clients use the same contract people do. The console is just another API client: build Evangelos without it and it runs exactly the same.
Inventory
Every certificate, its owner, its CA, where it is deployed and when it expires. What your CAs already issued comes in by import, so Evangelos can grow around what you have, the strangler fig applied to PKI, and the old system retires at your pace.
Renewal and deployment
Workloads renew themselves through ACME, EST or SCEP, or through the automation you already run: Evangelos starts it and checks the result.
Every CA, as many as you like
To Evangelos a CA is a backend: a few lines of configuration. Run as many as you want, public and private, side by side, each chosen by policy for its part of the name space. There is no charge per CA, ever.
Self-service, at speed
Evangelos is typically run by SecEng and delivered to the rest of the organization as a shared service. It is designed using the Google SRE engineering methodology, with velocity in mind. Teams request, renew and revoke their own certificates within guardrails. Friction is introduced only where it is absolutely necessary. Policy is inspired by the Unix permissions model, adapted to RBAC: owner, group, and r, w and x (read, write and revoke), applied to the DNS tree. It is small enough to learn in an afternoon and expressive enough for the most elaborate access rules. Sensitive requests wait for approval; everything else just happens.
Built the way security software should be.
- No secrets inside
- Evangelos is designed with secrets management as one of our fundamental objectives. Every secret it uses, from CA credentials to integration and automation secrets, lives in our secrets management platform. Evangelos's own keys, for TLS and mutual TLS, are generated in a hardware security module and live in hardware.
- Platform-generated keys
- If you want, Evangelos makes the key inside our secrets management platform, included for Evangelos's own use. It reaches its target through a single-use wrapped token and is deleted once delivered.
- A hardware root of trust
- Key management is modelled on the Visa PIN standard: dual control, split knowledge, keys in hardware. Software mode exists if you need it, but for production we recommend hardware.
- A record that can't be rewritten
- Every action is in a hash-chained audit log, its head anchored in Lotus every few minutes. A changed history no longer matches.
- Reconciled with the CAs
- Evangelos compares its inventory with what each CA says it issued, and flags any difference.
- No standing credentials for automation
- A renewal job gets a one-time grant for one certificate, valid until that renewal is done.
- API first
- Everything the console does goes through a documented REST API, described in OpenAPI.
- Signed, minimal images
- Distroless images pinned by digest, scanned for vulnerabilities, signed, with a software bill of materials. A cluster can be set to run nothing else.
- Hardened from boot to image
- Built to run on immutable operating systems with read-only system partitions, Secure Boot and TPM-measured boot, and node attestation where it is required. Our deployment guide covers it, on premises and in the cloud.
- Minimalist design principles
- Inspired by OpenBSD: correctness first, and every line read the way an attacker would read it. A microscopic memory footprint, with memory management treated, like security, almost as a religion.
Four problems we set out to end.
- Inaccessible cryptography
- Developers, administrators and users don't have to know OpenSSL commands or handle sensitive key material. They ask for a certificate through our API, the console, or the tools they already use. This keeps policy uniform and makes the sometimes opaque cryptographic processes accessible to a wider audience, while protecting the organization at the same time.
- Inconsistent keys and ciphers
- Algorithms, key sizes and lifetimes are policy as code, set for each part of the name space as one of the platform's guardrails, and every certificate follows it.
- Secrets sprawl
- Private keys never sit in tickets, wikis, mail or repositories. A key is made on the target, or generated by the platform and delivered through a single-use wrapped token.
- Manual key handling
- Infrastructure engineers, SREs and users run the automation without ever seeing or handling key material.
Protect what matters without slowing anyone down.
Evangelos is built for a self-service culture. Each team requests, renews and revokes its own certificates inside its own zone, within platform guardrails. Developer velocity is protected. Repetitive work is engineered away, not staffed, and SecEng stops being a queue.
- EvangelosRenews before expiry
- EvangelosDeploys, and confirms it landed
- EvangelosRevokes what it replaced
- EvangelosReconciles with every CA
- EvangelosWarns owners, and alerts on failure
- PeopleApprove where policy explicitly requires it
- PeopleRespond to incidents
- PeopleSet policy for their own zones
Load-tested at 50,000 certificates on two CPUs.
One 2-vCPU machine running Evangelos, its database and the test. The full report, method and raw results are available on request. Every change is reviewed by independent reviewers. Releases are signed and ship with a software bill of materials.
- 398 duntil March 2026
- 200 dfrom March 2026
- 100 dfrom March 2027
- 47 dfrom March 2029
Small enough to read. Modular by design.
Every part has a clear boundary and can be replaced: the CA, the secrets platform, the HSM, the identity provider, the automation. Use Lotus, keep the CAs you have, or both.
Free to leave, including us.
Deep vendor lock-in is a problem we set out to remove. Your inventory exports in open formats, CSV, XLSX and XML, whenever you ask, and every CA sits behind the same interface. Moving between CAs is still a project, so we plan it with you and help you through it, ours included. If we run it for you as a service, every key we hold for you is destroyed when you leave, in a key ceremony your witnesses must attend, and you receive a signed record of it.
The certificate authority, re-imagined.
Every part of Lotus was kept only if it earned its place. What remains is the core: correct cryptography, careful memory management, and the keys and the discipline around them.
Lotus runs its own key ceremony, with dual control and split knowledge on the model of the Visa PIN standard. The root and intermediate keys are both generated inside a hardware security module during the ceremony, and neither ever leaves it in the clear. The root's backup is encrypted inside the HSM, and the key that unlocks it is split M of N among custodians using Shamir's Secret Sharing, each share stored on its custodian's smart card. The ceremony leaves a signed transcript.
After the ceremony the root goes offline. The intermediate signs from the HSM, and revocation is handled by OCSP and CRL.
Lotus is designed to run in tandem with Evangelos, over a service mesh such as Cilium or Istio, with mutual TLS. The two anchor each other's audit logs cryptographically, so neither history can be rewritten without the other noticing. Lotus has no application server and no policy engine of its own: it is a signing pipeline and nothing else. Name constraints are the one exception, built into the CA certificate for those who want them.
Own it, or let us run it.
Own Evangelos outright: a perpetual licence, unlimited, running on your Kubernetes or servers from signed images, with your HSM and your identity provider. Add our optional 24x7 Watch, run by our security operations centre, if you'd like us keeping an eye on it. Or let us run a dedicated instance for you, in Canada or the EU, with monitoring included. The service is in early access.
Public TLS through the ACME client you already use, from the CA you choose. Domain validation set up once.
Adds single sign-on, zones, approvals, push renewal into your pipelines, and private PKI on a hosted intermediate.
A dedicated cluster in your region or your own cloud, your HSM, your root. Operated by us or by you.
Secrets management as a service
From the same lab, in the same regions. In early access.
Consulting
PKI orchestration design and modernization, key management, secrets management, security testing, and low-level reverse engineering. Independent: we resell nothing.
Work with us.
Tell us roughly how many certificates you run, which CAs issue them, and whether you want the service or your own installation. Or tell us about the problem you'd like help with.
hello@movingshadowlabs.com
Write to us