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A Their Story interview with Sean Martin & Marco Ciappelli
Guest: Yaron Kassner, Co-Founder and CTO, Silverfort
The organization telling us their story today is Silverfort.
What if you could have your cake and eat it too? No matter how many times you hear this, it still sounds good. Conversely, however, we can’t even remember how many conversations we’ve had over the years, about passwords and how inconvenient and old-fashioned they are—both for today’s businesses and for personal lives operating in the digital age.
Unfortunately not much has changed and, for a while, it looked like the best way to deal with adding extra security to a password was to verify it with yet another password. It felt like we were trying to maximize protection while minimizing disruptions; seemingly, this was (and still is?) as impossible as tasting that sweet cake and still having it. Drats!
Well, times are changing, and technology is finally coming to the rescue. Here is a story about it.
With over a decade in the cybersecurity industry, today’s guest — Yaron Kassner, Co-Founder of and CTO at Silverfort — tells a story of a career path that takes him through the data science and machine learning halls of Microsoft and Cisco before co-founding the Isreali-based firm, Silverfort, in 2015.
It’s probably a safe bet to agree with Yaron when he says:
“Passwords are all over. People hate passwords. Nobody likes them.”
Yet, we still rely on them as a means to secure our systems, our networks, our enterprise infrastructure, our cloud environments, and our sensitive data. Some organizations and individuals take things a step further by adding a layer of access control protection in the form of two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA). However, as described by Yaron, when you look at the attacks that are occurring and succeeding, the hackers always find a way around these additional factors of authentication and getting to the password.
“You don’t have to be a military expert to see that there’s a problem with passwords.”
How is this possible? That's where Yaron's story gets down and dirty. Yaron digs into the challenges associated with:
The deployment of technologies—do you really need another agent?
The user experience with these technologies—do users really need to re-authenticate all the time?
And, yes, key management—do we really need public/private keys and what does "zero-trust" mean in the world of authentication?
Drawing on his experiences working with machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence models, Yaron continues his journey in data science to help organizations overcome these authentication challenges.
It's a good story. Have a listen. Just input your password when prompted.
