# SPIFFE and SPIRE maintainer, co-author of Zero Trust Networks

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/evan-gilman/
Last updated: 2026-09-20
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

---

## Bio

Evan Gilman is a maintainer of SPIRE, the reference implementation of SPIFFE, and co-wrote O'Reilly's Zero Trust Networks. He was an engineer at Scytale, where SPIFFE and SPIRE were created before moving to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Profile built from public project and publication records.

## Where their work shows up

Human identity has a decade of standards. Workload identity had almost none until SPIFFE defined a universal identity document for a service and SPIRE worked out how to issue one without a secret to bootstrap from, attesting the workload through the platform it runs on instead. That is the foundation under service mesh authentication and most credible [zero trust](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-zero-trust/) architecture. See [what is machine identity](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-machine-identity/), the [SPIFFE and SPIRE profile](https://startwithidentity.com/vendors/machine-identity/spiffe-spire/), and the [best machine identity for enterprises](https://startwithidentity.com/rankings/best-machine-identity-for-enterprises/) ranking.