That assumption has been breaking down steadily as federal agencies have modernized their infrastructure and it is now breaking down fast enough that the gap between assumption and reality represents a genuine mission risk.

Modern federal OT environments are not isolated systems behind controllable perimeters. They are converged environments where operational technology, information technology, building management systems, and Facility Related Control Systems interact continuously because the mandates for modernization, cloud adoption, remote management capability, and mission effectiveness require that interaction. That convergence is delivering real operational value. It is also opening attack surfaces that perimeter-focused security was never designed to close.

The specific attack surface that nation-state adversaries have learned to exploit is not the perimeter. It is the machine-to-machine connection fabric inside the converged environment the thousands of automated connections between devices, systems, and applications that carry mission-critical data and commands across the OT/IT boundary without anyone validating whether the machine initiating each connection is actually what it claims to be.

Claroty and Corsha just announced a strategic integration that addresses that specific vulnerability with the precision it requires. The combination of Claroty’s Continuous Threat Detection and Corsha’s Machine Identity Provider creates a unified capability that gives every machine-to-machine connection in a federal OT environment a validated, continuously authenticated identity and gives security teams the visibility and automated response capability to act on what those identities reveal in real time.

Why Machine Identity Is the Gap That OT/IT Convergence Opened

Understanding why the Claroty-Corsha integration matters requires understanding the specific failure mode that OT/IT convergence creates in federal environments.

Human identity management in enterprise security has matured significantly over the past decade. Multi-factor authentication, identity federation, privileged access management, behavioral analytics the tooling and practice for validating that the person accessing a system is who they claim to be has reached a level of sophistication that makes human identity compromise harder and more detectable than it once was.

Machine identity management has not kept pace. The automated connections between systems the manufacturing robots connecting to data analytics applications at a shop floor edge, the building management systems interacting with IT infrastructure, the control systems exchanging data with cloud-based monitoring platforms typically authenticate through static credentials, API keys, or certificates that are issued once and do not change until they are explicitly rotated. In many cases, they do not rotate at all.

Static machine credentials are exploitable in a way that continuously authenticated identities are not. An adversary who obtains a static credential through network reconnaissance, through supply chain compromise, through a vulnerability in one of the connected systems can use that credential to move laterally through an OT environment as a trusted machine, issuing legitimate-looking commands, accessing sensitive systems, and establishing persistence without triggering the anomaly detection that behavioral monitoring of human users might catch.

In a federal OT environment where the converged attack surface includes missile defense systems, intelligence community facility controls, and Air Force sustainment infrastructure, lateral movement through compromised machine credentials is not an abstract threat scenario. It is the documented tradecraft of the nation-state adversaries that are actively targeting US critical infrastructure.

The Corsha Machine Identity Provider addresses this specific vulnerability by replacing static machine credentials with continuously authenticated, dynamically rotated identities. Every machine-to-machine connection is validated against a current, cryptographically authenticated identity rather than a static credential that could have been compromised at any point since it was issued. The authentication is not a one-time gate at connection establishment. It is continuous meaning that a credential compromised after connection establishment does not provide persistent access because the next authentication cycle will fail.

What Each Platform Brings And Why the Combination Is More Than the Sum

The Claroty-Corsha integration is architecturally significant because the two platforms address complementary dimensions of the OT security problem that neither could solve as effectively alone.

Claroty CTD provides the visibility foundation. The platform delivers continuous asset discovery and threat detection across the complete OT/IT/BMS/FRCS environment identifying every device, mapping every connection, and monitoring behavior patterns across the converged attack surface. The recent Authority to Operate grants at multiple military missile defense sites and a classified Intelligence Community FRCS validate CTD as a trusted technology partner in the most sensitive federal CPS environments that exist. That ATO validation is not a routine certification. It represents a thorough security evaluation by federal authorities who apply among the most rigorous assessment standards in any procurement context globally.

Corsha mIDP provides the identity enforcement layer. The platform’s ATO at the US Air Force Sustainment Center Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex where it is actively connecting manufacturing robots to data analytics applications at the shop floor edge validates its capability in exactly the kind of machine-to-machine connection environment that OT/IT convergence creates. The mIDP’s dynamic identity and access control replaces the static credential model with continuously authenticated machine identities that automatically rotate, cannot be reused across sessions, and can be revoked instantly when anomalous behavior is detected.

When these two capabilities are combined Claroty’s deep asset visibility and continuous threat monitoring with Corsha’s dynamic machine identity enforcement the result is a security posture that can both see every connection in the environment and validate the identity of every machine making those connections. Visibility without identity enforcement shows you what is happening but cannot prevent lateral movement through compromised credentials. Identity enforcement without visibility creates access controls that operate without the threat context needed to calibrate them correctly. Together, they provide the integrated detection and prevention capability that federal Zero Trust requirements demand.

Anusha Iyer, Corsha’s Founder and CEO, described the strategic intent clearly: delivering a unified Zero Trust-aligned foundation to CPS protection programs that reduces exposure, limits lateral movement, and simplifies compliance for stronger security across mission-critical infrastructure. That framing reducing exposure, limiting lateral movement, simplifying compliance maps directly to the three specific failure modes that OT/IT convergence creates and that federal security programs are most urgently trying to address.

Four Capabilities That Define What Federal OT Security Needs to Do Now

The integrated Claroty-Corsha capability is organized around four specific security functions that together constitute a complete response to the OT/IT convergence security challenge.

Zero Trust for OT moves federal OT security beyond the perimeter model that has defined most OT protection approaches historically. Identity-based access control for every machine and connection means that the question at every connection point is not “is this machine inside the perimeter?” but “is this machine who it claims to be, and is it authorized to make this specific connection right now?” The distinction is critical in converged environments where the perimeter is no longer a reliable security boundary.

Dynamic Segmentation addresses the lateral movement problem without requiring the complex manual re-architecture that network segmentation typically demands in OT environments. Automatically blocking suspicious traffic and limiting lateral movement based on identity validation and behavioral anomaly detection rather than requiring static network architecture changes enables security teams to contain threats in real time without disrupting the mission-critical connectivity that the OT environment depends on.

Real-Time Threat Prevention stops ransomware propagation and credential misuse at the machine-to-machine connection level. By validating machine identity at the connection point rather than at the perimeter, the integration intercepts lateral movement attempts before they can propagate through the OT environment addressing the specific attack pattern that has made ransomware so destructive in critical infrastructure environments where the lateral movement from initial compromise to mission-critical system impact can happen in hours.

Secure Modernization is the capability that enables federal agencies to pursue the cloud migration, AI adoption, and robotics automation that their modernization mandates require without accepting the security degradation that those transitions have historically created. Wrapping legacy OT systems in a layer of modern machine identity security allows agencies to connect those systems to modern infrastructure without exposing them to the credential-based attack vectors that static authentication creates.

The ATO Validation That Makes This Credible for Federal Buyers

The Authority to Operate grants that both Claroty CTD and Corsha mIDP have achieved are the specific validation that federal procurement requires and they deserve attention beyond the brief mention they typically receive in technology partnership announcements.

Federal ATO processes are among the most rigorous technology security evaluations in any procurement context. They involve detailed assessment of the system’s security controls, vulnerability analysis, risk assessment, and ongoing monitoring requirements. An ATO at a military missile defense site or a classified Intelligence Community FRCS is a different category of validation than commercial security certifications it reflects evaluation by federal security authorities who understand the specific threat environment and mission requirements of those deployments at a level of detail that external certification processes cannot replicate.

Claroty CTD’s ATO at multiple military missile defense sites and a classified IC FRCS validates the platform’s security architecture and operational reliability in the most sensitive federal CPS environments that exist. Corsha mIDP’s ATO at the AFSC Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex and its active deployment connecting manufacturing robots at a DoD sustainment facility validates its machine identity capability in a live federal OT environment that involves exactly the kind of machine-to-machine connections that the integration is designed to secure.

For federal agencies evaluating OT security investments, these ATO validations provide the evidence base that procurement decisions require. The integration of two ATO-validated platforms each proven in relevant federal environments reduces the evaluation burden and the implementation risk that comes with introducing new security capabilities into mission-critical OT environments where failure carries consequences beyond the IT department.

The Federal OT Security Market Context

The Claroty-Corsha integration enters a federal OT security market that is being reshaped by a convergence of mandate pressure, threat environment escalation, and technology transition complexity.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Binding Operational Directives, the National Security Agency’s OT/ICS cybersecurity guidance, and the DoD’s Zero Trust Strategy have collectively established a framework that requires federal agencies to move from perimeter-focused OT security to identity-aware, continuously monitored Zero Trust architectures across their converged environments. The direction is clear. The implementation challenge is significant particularly for agencies managing legacy OT infrastructure that was not designed with Zero Trust principles in mind and that cannot simply be replaced on the timeline that mandate compliance requires.

The integration model that Claroty and Corsha have built addresses that implementation challenge directly. By wrapping existing OT environments in continuous visibility and machine identity enforcement without requiring wholesale infrastructure replacement, the integration enables agencies to achieve meaningful Zero Trust progress on their existing asset base rather than waiting for infrastructure modernization cycles that may span years.

Jen Sovada, Claroty’s General Manager for Public Sector, framed the mission context that makes this work consequential: helping organizations defend against disruption to critical infrastructure delivery, preventing ransomware and supply chain attacks, and containing vulnerabilities in real time to enable true cyber resilience. In federal OT environments, where the systems being protected include missile defense infrastructure, intelligence community facilities, and Air Force sustainment operations, that mission framing is not marketing language. It is an accurate description of what is at stake.

What the Nation-State Threat Environment Actually Demands

The threat actor context that makes this integration urgent is specific enough to be worth naming directly rather than describing generically as “advanced adversaries.”

CISA’s advisories and the intelligence community’s public threat assessments have consistently identified Chinese state-sponsored actors particularly Volt Typhoon and related groups as actively pursuing pre-positioning access within US critical infrastructure OT environments. The documented tradecraft involves patient, low-and-slow compromise of OT systems through legitimate-looking machine-to-machine connections exactly the attack vector that static machine credentials enable and that continuously authenticated machine identities prevent.

The target set includes the categories of federal infrastructure that both Claroty and Corsha have ATO validations in: defense facilities, intelligence community infrastructure, and military sustainment operations. The adversary capability is sophisticated enough that perimeter-focused defenses are insufficient. The attack patterns are specifically designed to appear as legitimate machine traffic within the OT environment which is why visibility without identity validation cannot detect them and identity validation without visibility cannot contextualize them.

The combination of continuous asset visibility, behavioral threat detection, and dynamic machine identity enforcement that the Claroty-Corsha integration delivers is a direct architectural response to that documented threat pattern. It does not just improve security posture generically. It specifically addresses the machine identity gap that nation-state adversaries have learned to exploit in federal OT environments and it does so with two platforms that have already been validated for deployment in the specific federal environments they are designed to protect.

Research and Intelligence Sources: Claroty

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