# Keith Vaughan — Personal Archive & Writing

> Keith Vaughan — security and cloud professional. Founder of Cipher Projects and SumoSign; investor, fractional CTO and advisor to non-technical solo founders and enterprise teams across Australia, Singapore and the world. Path ran through IT procurement, US Navy port visits, and defence consulting, then cloud and security. Current work is evaluating AI-agent security and building the secure backends that power AI systems. Not an AI guru. Not affiliated with the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912-1977).

## What this site is
- A short personal archive: art-led home, Writing as the primary surface, Work as the relationship record.
- Machine facts live in `/.well-known/company-facts.json` (human mirror: `/company-facts.html`).
- Deep essays on systems, security, private AI, Cipher Projects and SumoSign.

## What he does
- Cloud infrastructure and cloud security, taken to production.
- Cybersecurity labs and content: challenge infrastructure, adversarial environments, realistic threat simulation (Fifth Domain).
- Evaluating the security of AI agents.
- Secure backend systems that power AI.
- Fractional CTO and technical advisory for founders and leadership teams.
- Investment in early-stage software businesses.

## Pages
- [Home](https://keithassociates.com/): Art hero → practice pillars → writing → companies.
- [Writing](https://keithassociates.com/writing/): Essay index — primary human + AI-rich surface.
- [Work](https://keithassociates.com/work/): Companies + delivery track record.
- [About](https://keithassociates.com/about/): Bio, operating principles, credentials.
- [Company Facts](https://keithassociates.com/company-facts.html): Human mirror of machine facts.
- [company-facts.json](https://keithassociates.com/.well-known/company-facts.json): Canonical machine-readable source of truth.

## Writing — Agent economy series
- [The Layoff Memo and the Betting Pool](https://keithassociates.com/writing/the-layoff-memo-and-the-betting-pool/) — Essay (2026-06-26). Layoffs and the solo boom are the same story: AI reprices execution.
- [Your Next User Doesn't Have Eyes](https://keithassociates.com/writing/your-next-user-doesnt-have-eyes/) — Essay (2026-07-03). Agents are where the web was in 1996; agent-ready products get the empty channel.
- [Is There Routing Yet?](https://keithassociates.com/writing/is-there-routing-yet/) — Essay (2026-07-10). Honest audit of Hölke's routing table: discovery is real, the table is not.

## Writing — Cafe Cursor
- [Why People Come to Cafe Cursor](https://keithassociates.com/writing/why-people-come-to-cafe-cursor/) — Essay (2026-08-24). Joe already built this for himself; we wrote down the core ideas. The harness does not matter.

## Writing — AI and security
- [The Crash Is No Longer the Hard Part](https://keithassociates.com/writing/the-crash-is-no-longer-the-hard-part/) — Essay (2026-08-31). Finding the crash is cheap; the scarce work is proof, scope, and disagreeing with a confident model.

## Current roles
- [SumoSign](https://sumosign.app) — Founder
- [Cipher Projects](https://cipherprojects.com) — Founder
- [Tech Ops Asia](https://techopsasia.com) — Director
- [Frontier Club](https://frontierclub.ai) — Co-founder (AI events in Asia; sponsors include Cipher Projects, Cursor and Apify)

## Prior delivery
- Fifth Domain — AWS Cloud Manager. Cybersecurity challenge infrastructure, adversarial labs, red-team environments.
- Department of Defence — Data Migration.
- NTT Dimension Data — Security portfolio and cloud.
- Defence — Consulting.
- US Navy — Port visit management.
- IT Procurement.

## Credentials
AWS Security Specialty, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified Developer, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, CompTIA Linux+.

## Contact
keith.vaughan@cipherprojects.com · Canberra, Australia · https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvx

## Sitemap
- https://keithassociates.com/sitemap.xml