“Let's Just Get Rid of All The Passwords. Let's Get Rid of All The Friction. We Just Have Everything We Need.”

Silo Busting 53: Mandeep Khera and Sam Rehman Go Passwordless

It’s time for your authentication journey! Mandeep Khera, the Chief Marketing Officer at SecureAuth, is our guide in this #SecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting. And Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, is of course on hand to pepper Khera with questions about the fascinating concept of passwordless.

Khera begins with a little history—we move from plain text passwords to hashing to one-time passwords to multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and behavioral—and then concludes: “But guess what, passwords are still around and it doesn't make any sense.”

The role of passwordless, Khera says, is to “clear all the friction for users and provide a lot more security.”

It isn’t, of course, that simple. “A lot of people are claiming [that they are using] passwordless, but it's not quite there yet,” says Khera.

The reason—the real reason—we need to evolve to a real passwordless system, Khera says, is that roughly 80% of today’s cyberattacks happen because of credentials.

Together Khera and Rehman talk about identifying ourselves via our phones and physicality and the annoying friction created by passwords (“Let's just get rid of all the passwords. Let's get rid of all the friction. We just have everything we need”).

The pair zero in on the idea that behavioral monitoring and analytics might provide an answer. “I kind of know what you like to talk about,” says Rehman. “If all the sudden you start talking to me about, you know, Amber Heard… I’d be like: Is this Mandeep?”

It’s a fantastic conversation about how our computing future might operate. To hear it, you need only intone the famed cinematic shibboleth Klaatu barada nikto.

Just kidding. You need only click Play. Happy listening!

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon