Mr. Arun Kumar Elengovan

Secrets Management Is a Strategic Engineering Responsibility

Abstract:

Secrets are the keys to your kingdom. API tokens, encryption keys, certificates, and cloud credentials are the crown jewels of any organization. Yet too often, they are treated as afterthoughts, buried in environment files or passed around in chat threads. In this keynote, Arun Kumar Elengovan, Director of Security Engineering at Okta,Inc., will unpack the real story behind secrets management: why it is not just a security task, not just a developer annoyance, but a foundational part of modern engineering strategy.

Drawing from real experiences across scale, automation, and incident response, this talk will explore how secrets shape system reliability, organizational risk, and developer velocity. You will learn what it takes to go from reactive cleanup to proactive design thereby building systems where secrets rotate, access is limited, audits are automatic, and developers can ship securely without slowing down.

If you have ever asked "who owns this key?" or "is this credential still valid?" then this talk is for you.

Profile:

Arun Kumar Elengovan is the Director of Engineering Security at Okta,Inc., where he leads a global team across the US, Canada, and India focused on advancing identity security at scale. He is recognized for pioneering work in AI security, Cryptographic Agility, DDoS mitigation, Web Security, Risk Mitigation, Incident Response, Secrets and Certificate Management, and large scale infrastructure security, including FedRAMP High initiatives and PKI automation.

An award winning security leader with international visibility, Arun is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), Fellow of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), and a Distinguished Fellow of Soft Computing Research Society (SCRS), Fellow of Hackathon Raptors and Advisory Council Member of Products That Count. His thought leadership includes published Forbes articles, and keynote presentations at global conferences such as Oktane 2025- the AI Security Event of the year, IEEE World Conference on Applied Intelligence and Computing (AIC), International Conference on Intelligent Vision and Computing (ICIVC) and International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Data Communication (ICCIDC).

Beyond his leadership and research, Arun has served as a judge for the Sammy, CES Innovation Awards, Smallest AI Hackathon, and as a reviewer for IEEE Access, Elsevier, and Springer journals. His work continues to shape the future of cybersecurity, bridging advanced AI with resilient identity and trust systems.