No, I’m not declaring another thing in identity management dead. Instead, I’d like you to join me in exploring something that has been bugging me quite a bit lately. Risk-based Authentication can cover a spectrum of capabilities, but most generically it is a passive authentication factor that tries to measure the risk of a particular
The last few years have seen an uptick in efforts to use biometrics more widely in authentication, most notably driven by the consumerization effect of Apple introducing Touch ID and Face ID. But this could be the (strong) nudge that was needed to push it over the edge. Mastercard just announced that all issuers of
Back in 2013, I opened my ‘Hitchhikers Guide to Identity’ talk with the following slide. As an industry, we’ve come a long way since then. Multi-factor Authentication is mainstream, as is Paul Madsen’s t-shirt contest at CIS. Most companies are no longer debating whether their security can be entrusted to cloud-based solutions, as IDaaS solutions
So I waited patiently for the folks at the Cloud Identity Summit to publish on their Youtube channel the talk I gave earlier this year on Invisible Identity. But it never came. Turns out that a few session recordings got messed up, and unfortunately mine was among them. I sense Paul Madsen’s hand in this.
In my last post regarding weaknesses in how 2FA is implemented in the systems we rely on to secure us, I teased a thought that had occurred to me in going through the analysis I presented in the post. As usual, life intervened to distract me, but this recent post by Coinbase sharing their experience of
Two Factor Authentication (or 2FA) has been in the news a lot recently. There was the kerfuffle over NIST putting into their update of 800-63 that SMS-based 2FA is insufficiently secure and should be deprecated (something most security experts agree on). That update (still in draft) came too late for the Social Security Administration (SSA),
In part 1 of my blog post expanding on my Cloud Identity Summit talk on Invisible Identity, I proposed ‘The 4 Core Principles of Invisible Identity‘ that ensure that security and usability stay in a symbiotic partnership for an organization. I believe that adopting the concept of Invisible Identity will be vital to securing people
Almost 4 years ago I wrote a post titled ‘The Epic Hacking of Mat Honan and Our Identity Challenge‘. In it I examined how hackers exploited the ways in which our online accounts are daisy chained together through poor password recovery and KBA based systems to systematically take over Mat Honan’s digital life. 4 years
The Cloud Identity Summit is underway here in New Orleans, and it’s off to a great start. The organizers have done a wonderful job again, and with so much great content, the hardest thing is choosing which of the many interesting talks to go to. My talk is already done (it’s oddly liberating to not
If you’ve followed my last few blog posts, you may have noticed the topic of usability in security pop up quite a bit. I’ve said in the past that usability issues in security should be considered vulnerabilities, because they create attack vectors in the form of user errors, exploits and workarounds. The idea was captured