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How To Build An Authentication Platform

Today's authentication requirements go way beyond hooking into a database or directory and challenging every user and service for an Id and password.  Authentication and the login experience, is the application entry point and can make or break your security posture and end user experience. 

Authentication is typically associated with identifying, to a certain degree of assurance, who or what you are interacting with.  Authorization is typically identifying and allowing what that person or thing can do.  This blog is focused on the former, but I might stray in to the latter from time to time.

There are numerous use cases that a modern enterprise needs to fulfil, if authentication services are to deliver value.  These can include:

Authentication for a service or APIDevice authenticationMetrics, timing and analytics of flowsThreat intelligence integrationAnonymous to known authentication profilingContextual analysis In addition to the basic functional requirements, there are several …
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2019 Digital Identity Progress Report

Schools out for summer?  Well not quite.  Unless you're living in the east coast of Australia, it's looking decidedly bleak weather wise for most of Europe and the American east coast.  But I digress.  Is it looking bleak for your digital identity driven projects?  What's been a success, where are we heading and what should we look out for?

Where We Are TodayPasswordless - (Reports says B-)

 Over the last 24 months, there have been some pretty big themes that many organisations embarking on digital identity and security related projects, have been trying to succeed at.  First up, the age old chestnut...of passwordless authentication.  The password is dead, long live the password!  We are definitely making progress though.  Many of the top public sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter et al) provide multi-factor authentication options at least.  Passwords are still required as the first step, but the end user education and familiarity with something other than a password during …
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Renewable Security: Steps to Save The Cyber Security Planet

Actually, this has nothing to-do with being green.  Although, that is a passion of mine.  This is more to-do with a paradigm that is becoming more popular in security architectures: that of being able to re-spin particular services to a known “safe” state after breach, or even as a preventative measure before a breach or vulnerability has been exploited.

Triple R's of Security
This falls into what is known as the “3 R’s of Security”.  A quick Google on that topic will result in a fair few decent explanations of what that can mean.  The TL;DR is basically, rotate (credentials), repair (vulnerabilities) and repave (services and servers to a known good state).  This approach is gaining popularity mainly due devops deployment models.  Or “secdevops”.  Or is it “devsecops”?  Containerization and highly automated “code to prod” pipelines make it a lot easier to get stuff into production, iterate and go again.  So how does security play into this?

Left-Shifting 
Well I want to back track…
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12 Steps to Zero Trust Success

A Google search for “zero trust” returns ~ 195Million results.  Pretty sure some are not necessarily related to access management and cyber security, but a few probably are.  Zero Trust was a term coined by analyst group Forrester back in 2010 and has gained popularity since Google started using the concept with their employee management project called BeyondCorp.


It was originally focused on network segmentation but has now come to include other aspects of user focused security management.

Below is a hybrid set of concepts that tries to cover all the current approaches.  Please comment below so we can iterate and add more to this over time.


Assign unique, non-reusable identifiers to all subjects [1], objects [2] and network devices [3]Authenticate every subjectAuthenticate every deviceInspect, verify and validate every object access requestLog every object access requestAuthentication should contain 2 of something you have, something you are, something you knowSuccessful authenticatio…
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Cyber Security Skills in 2018

Last week I passed the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker exam.  Yay to me.  I am a professional penetration tester right?  Negatory.  I sat the exam more as an exercise to see if I “still had it”.  A boxer returning to the ring.  It is over 10 years since I passed my CISSP.  The 6-hour multi-choice horror of an exam, that was still being conducted using pencil and paper down at the Royal Holloway University.  In honesty, that was a great general information security bench mark and allowed you to go in multiple different directions as an "infosec pro".  So back to the CEH…

There are now a fair few information security related career paths in 2018.  The basic split tends to be something like:

Managerial  - I don’t always mean managing people, more risk management, compliance management and auditingTechnical - here I guess I focus upon penetration testing, cryptography or secure software engineeringOperational - thinking this is more security operation centres, log analysis an…
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The Role Of Mobile During Authentication

Nearly all the big player social networks now provide a multi-factor authentication option – either an SMS sent code or perhaps key derived one-time password, accessible via a mobile app.  Examples include Google’s Authenticator, Facebook’s options for MFA (including their Code Generator, built into their mobile app) or LinkedIn’s two-step verification.  There are lots more examples, but the main component is using the user’s mobile phone as an out of band authenticator channel.

Phone as a Secondary Device - “Phone-as-a-Token”

The common term for this is “phone-as-a-token”.  Depending on the statistics, basic mobile phones are now so ubiquitous that the ability to leverage at least SMS delivered one one-time-passwords (OTP) for users who do not have either data plans or smart phones is common.  This is an initial step in moving away from the traditional user name and password based login.  However, since the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released their view that…
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How Information Security Can Drive Innovation

Information Security and Innovation: often at two different ends of an executive team’s business strategy. The non-CIO ‘C’ level folks want to discuss revenue generation, efficiency and growth. Three areas often immeasurably enhanced by having a strong and clear innovation management framework. The CIO’s objectives are often focused on technical delivery, compliance, uploading SLA’s and more recently on privacy enablement and data breach prevention. So how can the two worlds combine, to create a perfect storm for trusted and secure economic growth?

Innovation Management  But firstly how do organisations actually become innovative? It is a buzzword that is thrown around at will, but many organisations fail to build out the necessary teams and processes to allow innovation to succeed. Innovation basically focuses on the ability to create both incremental and radically different products, processes and services, with the aim of developing net-new revenue streams. But can this process …
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