Tag: Usable Security

Hu: The Missing Element

Below you can find a version of the talk that I just gave at the European Identity Conference and at Identiverse talking about what I consider to be the missing element in Identity Management. Seems the curse that the A/V gods put on me at last years Cloud Identity Summit survived the conference rebranding, as

Securing Our Biometrics-Based Future

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

My Next Gig: Delivering the Identity-Defined Perimeter with Uniken

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

Invisible Identity, or How to Delight People & Secure Users

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.

Doing 2FA Better Could Mean Using Social Factors

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

Doing 2FA Correctly Requires More Than 2 Factors

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),

Privacy in the World of Invisible Identity

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

The 4 Core Principles of Invisible Identity

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

Identity at the Nexus of Security and Usability

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