A PKI under the control plane, Ed25519-signed policy bundles, mTLS between agents and CP, and no phone-home. Self-hosted, air-gap capable — keys and data stay inside your perimeter.
qf security rests on cryptography, not on trusting the network. The control plane runs its own certificate authority, signs every policy bundle with an Ed25519 key, and agents talk to the CP only over mTLS. Neither the agent nor the control plane reaches outward — all exchange stays inside your perimeter.
An agent applies a bundle only after verifying its signature: a policy that did not come from your CP, or was altered in transit, will not run. The Ed25519 signature attests to policy authenticity and integrity — it is not a licensing mechanism or a lock-in.
Identity, signature, channel, and no external dependencies — each verified cryptographically.
The CP runs its own certificate authority and issues agent certificates at enrollment. Certificate revocation and enrollment tokens stay under your control. No external CAs, no cloud trust services.
Every bundle is signed with an Ed25519 key. An agent enforces a policy only after verifying the signature, guaranteeing authenticity and integrity. Ed25519 attests to the policy source — it is not a license.
Agents and the control plane connect over mTLS gRPC: both sides present certificates. Bundles, counters, and events travel one authenticated channel — no inbound management port exposed on the agent.
Neither the agent nor the CP calls external servers — not for activation, not for telemetry. Enrollment via an out-of-band CA-fingerprint pin, an offline cache, and full air-gap operation. Keys and data stay in your perimeter.
Zero-trust segmentation fails on the risk of a single switch, not on the technique. qf separates observing from denying in time.
Policies run in observe mode: qf logs what traffic passes between hosts without dropping anything. You see actual flows instead of guessing at topology.
Dry-run and preview show which hosts and rules a new policy will change before it applies. Observed traffic on the host page confirms nothing needed will be caught by a deny.
Enforcement is turned on one segment at a time, not fleet-wide at once. The cascade carries each change to all affected hosts, and audit records before/after at every step.
By default qf runs fail-open (ALLOW): a forgotten or not-yet-rolled-out rule will not cut a host off. This is a managed, staged path toward default-deny, not "default-deny out of the box" — segmentation is enabled deliberately, not with one switch.
Industry estimates put roughly 70% of organizations treating microsegmentation as important for zero trust, while only around 5% actually segment their network, with implementation complexity cited as the top barrier by up to 40% [source: zeronetworks.com, scworld.com]. The gap is not in the idea — it is in rollout risk and lack of visibility.
qf closes exactly that gap: host segmentation with no new hardware, a staged log → observe → deny path instead of a big-bang default-deny, and visibility into real traffic before you apply. These industry figures are external market context, not qf metrics.
The control plane is autonomous: state lives in your PostgreSQL and a PKI directory, with no Kubernetes, no etcd, and no external services. Private CA keys and policy-signing keys are generated and kept on your side. qf deploys on-prem, up to a fully air-gapped environment with no internet access.
In air-gap mode agents enroll via an out-of-band CA-fingerprint pin and update from a registry mirror, while an offline cache keeps enforcement running when the CP is unreachable. Nothing leaves the perimeter — not telemetry, not keys, not policies.
Every policy bundle is signed with an Ed25519 key on the control-plane side. The agent verifies the signature before applying and will not enforce a bundle with a missing or invalid signature. The signature attests to policy authenticity and integrity — it is not a license key.
No. Neither the agent nor the control plane phones home — not for activation, not for telemetry. Agents can enroll via an out-of-band CA-fingerprint pin and update from a local registry mirror. qf runs fully air-gapped with no internet access.
No. By default qf runs fail-open (ALLOW): a forgotten rule will not cut a host off. The move to default-deny is managed and staged — log, observe, deny, segment by segment, with before/after audit and a preview of affected hosts.
On your side. Private CA keys and policy signatures are generated and kept in the control plane PKI directory, and state lives in your PostgreSQL. There are no external CAs or cloud trust services; qf deploys on-prem, including air-gapped.