Open Source Trust Stack
The infrastructure of trust assurance
Controls you cannot prove are controls you do not own.
This is the open-source toolkit for trust assurance. It covers security monitoring, access control, auditability, integrity, and verifiable provenance around regulated data, connected devices, and AI-enabled systems. The tools are production-ready, vendor-neutral, and designed for environments where leaders must produce evidencewhen regulators, auditors, or breach response teams come calling.
Healthcare, defense, manufacturing, and food production organizations use these tools to build security infrastructure they control. If you handle PHI, CUI, OT systems, or clinical AI, this stack applies to your environment.
Reference Implementation:
We have released a working Docker Compose reference implementation of the core stack on GitHub:
github.com/BigDataPlumbing/opensource_truststack
Who this is for
Healthcare & Life Sciences — CIOs/CISOs handling PHI, clinical trials, SaMD integration.
Defense & Aerospace — teams managing CMMC compliance, secure supply chains, air-gapped systems.
Manufacturing & Industrial — OT security leads protecting shop floors, PLCs, production data integrity.
Food & Beverage — QA/QC teams ensuring traceability and safety compliance (FSMA/FDA).
Common baseline (start here)
Get the foundation right before picking specialized tools:
Identity & policy: Keycloak / Authentik + Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Kubernetes policy enforcement: Gatekeeper + Kyverno.
Observability: OpenObserve + Prometheus + Grafana + OpenTelemetry Collector.
Search: OpenSearch (log/event search at scale).
Incident response: TheHive (case management).
Secrets & certs: HashiCorp Vault + step-ca + cert-manager.
Supply chain & vulnerability management: Syft + Grype + Trivy + OWASP Dependency-Track.
Data plumbing: Apache Kafka / NATS / RabbitMQ for event-driven pipelines.
State: PostgreSQL.
Everything below follows the Trust Stack layers: Secure, Control, Comply, Verify, Prove.
Secure — Detection and security telemetry
This is where you catch bad actors and honest mistakes.
Wazuh — endpoint security and log analysis; host telemetry and alerts.
Suricata — network IDS; packet-based detections and metadata.
Zeek — network telemetry; high-fidelity protocol logs for investigations.
Falco — runtime detection; suspicious process and container behaviors.
osquery — endpoint inventory and posture queries; evidence collection at scale.
YARA — content and malware pattern matching; rule-driven detection.
Sigma — portable detection rule specification; normalize analytics across backends.
Secure — Network policy and segmentation
Most attackers do not charge the front gate. They slip in dressed as janitors and leave with the keys to the kingdom. Segmentation locks the broom closet behind them.
Cilium — eBPF-powered networking and security; network policy and observability.
Calico — Kubernetes network policy; segmentation and enforcement patterns.
Secure — OT and edge connectivity
The shop floor and the clinic have their own protocols. Ignore them and your “security stack” is decorative.
EdgeX Foundry — edge integration framework; device and sensor ingestion patterns.
MQTT — lightweight pub/sub protocol; common OT and IoT transport layer.
OPC UA — industrial interoperability protocol; structured telemetry and control exchange.
Secure — Core data stores
Your data lives somewhere. Make that somewhere reliable and auditable.
PostgreSQL — durable relational store; audit and event state, case data, reporting.
MariaDB — relational alternative; common backbone for ERP and QMS applications.
Redis — cache and queue; low-latency task coordination and transient state.
Control — Identity, access, and policy
Security locks the doors. Control decides who gets keys, when, and why.
Keycloak — OIDC/SAML identity provider; SSO, realms, clients, RBAC foundations.
Authentik — simpler OIDC SSO and identity brokering; fast path to central auth.
Open Policy Agent (OPA) — policy-as-code engine; portable authorization and compliance rules.
Gatekeeper (OPA) — Kubernetes admission control with OPA; enforce policy on cluster resources.
Kyverno — Kubernetes-native policy engine; validate, mutate, generate configuration policy.
Control — AI Gateway and Guardrails
The gateway is the choke point. All model traffic passes through it—or it does not happen. “LLM says, app decides.”
Kong Gateway (Open Source) — API gateway with AI proxy plugins; authentication, rate limiting, LLM routing.
Traefik — modern edge router; dynamic configuration and middleware for AI service meshes.
Envoy — high-performance proxy; backbone for zero-trust service-to-service policy and mTLS.
NGINX — reverse proxy/load balancer; straightforward ingress and routing in regulated environments.
NeMo Guardrails — NVIDIA toolkit for programmable LLM guardrails; enforces structure, safety, security policies.
Guardrails AI — Python framework for structure and type validation (Pydantic-style) on LLM outputs; JSON compliance and schema adherence.
LLM Guard — security toolkit for LLMs; sanitization, PII stripping, prompt injection detection.
Microsoft Presidio — PII detection/redaction library; strong “canary” building block for custom guardrails.
Control — Streaming and event buses
Data pipelines are the pipes. These tools move bytes from A to B reliably and fast.
Apache Kafka — high-throughput distributed event streaming; backbone for real-time pipelines.
NATS / NATS JetStream — lightweight, high-performance messaging; excellent for edge and microservices.
RabbitMQ — reliable message broker; standard for task queues and service messaging.
Control — Incident response and case management
When something breaks, you need a system to track the fix—not emails and sticky notes.
TheHive — incident case management; tasks, observables, structured response workflows.
FIR (Fast Incident Response) — lightweight IR case tracking; fast case record workflows.
Control — Automation and orchestration
Manual response does not scale. Automate the boring parts so humans focus on judgment calls.
n8n — automation workflows; glue for notifications, enrichment, ticketing.
Shuffle — SOAR-style automation; security workflow building blocks.
StackStorm — event-driven automation; actions, sensors, rule-based orchestration.
Control — Secrets, keys, and certificate lifecycle
If your secrets live in plaintext config files, stop reading and fix that first.
HashiCorp Vault — secrets management; dynamic credentials, PKI, encryption workflows.
SoftHSM — software HSM interface; PKCS#11-backed key operations for testing/development.
step-ca — open-source certificate authority; modern PKI and identity bootstrap patterns.
cert-manager — Kubernetes certificate management; automate issuance and rotation.
Comply — Health data interoperability and clinical integration
Healthcare has its own data formats. FHIR and HL7 are the lingua franca. Ignore them and clinical integration stalls.
HAPI FHIR — open-source FHIR server and libraries; clinical data APIs and interoperability.
NextGen Connect (Mirth Connect) — integration engine; HL7 v2/FHIR routing and transformation.
Comply — Quality management and audit workflows
Compliance theater is a Broadway production of logs and checklists filled by the same ink pen at the end of each shift. Replace theater with systems that produce real records.
ERPNext — ERP and QMS capabilities; MES-style workflows and quality records.
Verify — Logging, metrics, and traces
Logs that can be deleted are not logs. They are liabilities. Build an audit trail you can trust.
OpenObserve — logs/metrics/traces in one system; security and compliance event capture.
OpenSearch — search and analytics engine; scalable log and event search.
Grafana — dashboards and alert visualization; shared views for operators and auditors.
Prometheus — metrics scraping and alert rules; service health and SLO signals.
OpenTelemetry Collector — vendor-neutral telemetry pipeline; standardize traces, metrics, logs.
Jaeger — distributed tracing UI; visualize transaction flows and latency across microservices.
Verify — Backups and recoverability evidence
Hope is not a backup strategy. Prove your data can come back when it matters.
restic — encrypted, deduplicated backups; simple, auditable backup workflows.
Velero — Kubernetes backup/restore and migration; cluster recoverability patterns.
Verify — Adversary tactics mapping and security validation
Test your defenses before the adversary does. Red team yourself.
MITRE ATT&CK Navigator — ATT&CK matrix visualization; map detections and coverage.
MITRE Caldera — adversary emulation; validate detections with controlled campaigns.
Atomic Red Team — open test library of adversary techniques; repeatable verification tests.
Verify — Baseline hardening and compliance posture
Scan your systems before the auditor does.
OpenSCAP — security compliance scanning; benchmarks and posture assessment.
Lynis — system hardening audits; quick baseline checks for Linux hosts.
Prove — Integrity, provenance, and software supply chain
If you cannot prove it, you do not own it. Where trust becomes auditable.
in-toto — signed supply chain metadata; attest what happened during build and release.
Sigstore (cosign/rekor/fulcio) — signing and transparency log patterns; artifact provenance.
Syft — SBOM generation; inventories for containers and binaries.
Grype — vulnerability scanning against SBOMs; CVE reporting aligned to components.
Trivy — vulnerability scanning for containers and file systems; baseline scanner in CI/CD.
OWASP Dependency-Track — SBOM ingestion and continuous component risk tracking.
Prove — Verifiable logs and transparency
Immutable proof. Cryptographic certainty. No one quietly edits history.
Trillian — verifiable data structures; ledger backend used by Certificate Transparency and Sigstore.
Rekor (part of Sigstore) — tamper-evident transparency log for software signing.
Prove — Data lineage and governance
Track how data moves through pipelines. When something goes wrong, trace it to the source.
OpenLineage — open standard for data lineage; track data movement through pipelines.
Marquez — reference implementation for OpenLineage; lineage catalog and visualization.
Practical guardrails
Fancy tools mean nothing if you skip the basics.
Pinned versions — reproducible builds; reduce configuration drift.
Health and readiness checks — operational visibility; fast failure detection.
Time normalization (UTC) — consistent correlation across logs, traces, cases.
Deterministic processing — repeatable outputs for audit and verification.
Trust nothing. Prove everything.
The reference implementation is available at github.com/BigDataPlumbing/opensource_truststack.
Excellent breakdown of trust infrasturcture that actually matters in regulated environments. The emphasis on "controls you cannot prove are controls you do not own" cuts through alot of security theater. I've seen orgs struggle mostly with the Prove layer because they nail detection and policy but dunno how to operationalize SBOMs and verifiable logs when auditors show up. The shift from compliance checklists to cryptographic evidence is where real security starts.