Knox vs. 12Port

Knox is a secret management solution created to securely store and rotate sensitive information, including secrets, keys, and passwords used across various services. At Pinterest, a wide range of keys and secrets are relied upon for numerous purposes, such as signing cookies, encrypting sensitive data, securing the network with TLS, accessing AWS machines, and interacting with third-party services. The potential for these keys to be compromised presented major challenges, as rotating them often required a deployment and usually involved modifications to the codebase. Previously, keys and secrets were kept in Git repositories at Pinterest, which led to their widespread replication throughout the organization's infrastructure and on numerous employee laptops, making it nearly impossible to monitor access and audit permissions for their use. To tackle these challenges, Knox was designed to make it easier for developers to securely access and manage confidential secrets, keys, and credentials. It guarantees the confidentiality of these sensitive assets while incorporating strong mechanisms for key rotation in case of a security breach, thereby significantly improving security practices. By adopting Knox, Pinterest seeks to not only enhance its secret management processes but also to strengthen its defenses against potential vulnerabilities, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected at all times. This proactive approach reflects Pinterest's commitment to safeguarding its data and maintaining trust with its users.

12Port is a modern privileged access management platform built to secure privileged human, vendor, machine, and AI identities across enterprise infrastructure. The system uses an agentless architecture, allowing organizations to broker administrative sessions without installing software on every managed endpoint. Privileged users authenticate to 12Port, which retrieves the required credential from a secure vault, injects it into the destination session, and prevents the user from seeing the secret directly. Supported access methods include SSH, RDP, PowerShell, VNC, Telnet, HTTP, and other protocols commonly used for system administration. Just-in-time access, approval workflows, and zero-standing-privilege controls help reduce persistent administrative access and limit opportunities for lateral movement. The credential vault stores passwords, service accounts, API keys, certificates, SSH keys, database credentials, and other privileged secrets while supporting rotation, reconciliation, and credential history. Session Intelligence captures video, transcripts, events, and behavioral data from privileged activity so security teams can monitor sessions, investigate anomalies, and create searchable audit evidence. 12Port also provides an MCP server that enables AI agents to request scoped credentials and system access through governed privileged access workflows. The platform can operate across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, operational technology, and isolated network environments while supporting compliance programs such as SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, NIST, and CMMC. 12Port is designed to help security, IT, infrastructure, and compliance teams consolidate privileged access, credential management, session auditing, and AI-agent governance into a single platform.