Tag Archives: How To

Architecture Ages. Security Programs Should Plan for That

Posted on by
Reply

Every security architecture has an expiration date.

Most organizations simply do not know when it arrives.

An architecture may have been carefully designed, properly documented, and well defended when it was introduced. It reflected the business, technology, threat environment, and operational assumptions of its time.

Then the organization changed.

It adopted cloud services. It acquired another company. Employees became more distributed. Vendors received deeper access. Applications became API-driven. Automation expanded. AI entered business workflows. Identity became the connective tissue between systems that no longer shared a traditional perimeter.

The architecture did not suddenly fail.

It aged.

80sIBM

Continue reading →

Account Recovery Is Becoming the New Identity Attack Surface

Posted on by
Reply

As passkeys and phishing-resistant authentication reduce password risk, attackers will move pressure to the recovery plane.

The industry is moving in the right direction.

Passkeys, FIDO2/WebAuthn, hardware security keys, conditional access, better MFA policies, and risk-based sign-in controls are all meaningful improvements. They reduce entire classes of credential theft. They make phishing harder. They remove reusable passwords from many authentication ceremonies. They shift more of the security burden from user judgment to protocol design.

That is good.

But it is not the finish line.

In my recent passkeys article, I called out a point that deserves its own treatment: passkeys do not solve weak account recovery, help desk social engineering, stolen session tokens, OAuth consent abuse, unmanaged vendor access, or excessive privilege. They are a major step forward, but they do not remove the rest of the identity attack surface.

That matters because attackers adapt.

Continue reading →

Passkeys, Not Passcodes: A Practical Enterprise Guide to Moving Beyond Passwords

Posted on by
Reply

There is a small terminology problem in the identity world right now, and it matters more than it looks.

A passcode or PIN is usually a local unlock secret. It unlocks a phone, a laptop, Windows Hello, an authenticator app, or a hardware security key. A passkey is different. A passkey is the standards-based replacement for passwords, built on FIDO2/WebAuthn. The user unlocks the passkey locally with a fingerprint, face scan, device PIN, pattern, or security key, but the website or application receives cryptographic proof — not a reusable password. FIDO defines passkeys as FIDO authentication credentials based on FIDO standards, tied to an account, and used with the same process the user already uses to unlock a device.

That distinction is not pedantry. It is the difference between a local unlock method and a replacement for one of the most abused controls in the history of computing.

Passwords have had a long run. They also have had a long list of failures: reuse, phishing, spraying, stuffing, database theft, weak reset workflows, help desk abuse, and user fatigue. We have spent decades trying to compensate for those failures with complexity rules, expiration schedules, password managers, SMS codes, mobile push prompts, training campaigns, and detective controls.

Some of those helped. Some just moved the pain around.

Passkeys change the model.

Continue reading →