Cisco Rolls Out Duo Passwordless Authentication, Sees WebAuthn Usage Surge

Archive for the ‘Biometrics’ Category

Cisco Rolls Out Duo Passwordless Authentication, Sees WebAuthn Usage Surge

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Excerpt from: Cisco Rolls Out Duo Passwordless Authentication, Sees WebAuthn Usage Surge

Cisco plans to roll out its Duo Passwordless Authentication globally next Wednesday. This push is in line with the findings from Duo Security’s recent report which showed that passwordless adoption continues to climb.

“We’re starting to reach a tipping point where the hardware is ubiquitous, the standards are in place, and enough services support the standards, and that’s really driving that increase that we see in web authentications. So now … organizations can adopt them with confidence,” Goerlich said.

Read the full article: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/cisco-rolls-out-duo-passwordless-authentication-sees-webauthn-usage-surge/2022/11/


This post is an excerpt from a press article. To see other media mentions and press coverage, click to view the Media page or the News category. Do you want to interview Wolf for a similar article? Contact Wolf through his media request form.

SDxCentral: Why Cisco Duo’s on a Quest to Kill the Password

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Things to know about passwordless security: no, criminals will not cut off your thumb or peel the skin off your face to steal your biometrics and hack your network. And yes, C-suite executives always ask Wolfgang Goerlich, advisory CISO at Cisco Duo, this question.

Excerpt from: Why Cisco Duo’s on a Quest to Kill the Password.

“Everybody does,” he said. “We’ve seen so many ‘Mission Impossible’ movies — we know the risk. But here’s the thing: if a criminal is able to clone my biometrics, get ahold of my phone, get ahold of my computer, and bring those both into my home office, and then authenticate as me, and then only open up the applications that I normally open up during business hours, at that point I may just hire him as a contractor.”

He encourages CISOs to “bundle” passwordless with other zero-trust security tools such as identity and access management. “Partnering identity with passwordless is very appealing because we can establish that strong user identity with strong authentication factors without requiring more user effort. So this is a rare opportunity where it can actually reduce the amount of work that they need to do to establish that strong authentication.”

Read the full article: https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/why-cisco-duos-on-a-quest-to-kill-the-password/2020/08/

Wolf’s Additional Thoughts

As part of the design series, I have put forth the idea that being ahead of the curve is being ahead of the criminal. The early adoption of a control — doing something right but rare — has surprising stopping power against common attacks. I expect organizations who are early adopters of single strong factor authentication, passwordless, will have this sort of surprisingly strong defense.

Well, for a while. When adoption reaches critical mass, the criminals will be highly motivated to work around passwordless authentication. We have seen this with strong second-factor authentication and criminals adopting phishing and proxying to bypass this control.

Therefore, my strong recommendation is pairing passwordless with additional anti-fraud measures. Include the device identification in the authentication. Include behavior analytics (where, when, how) to further bolster trust in the authentication. We can predict criminals will work around these authentication methods, so let’s move now to put in place compensating controls to detect and prevent their next move.


This post is an excerpt from a press article. To see other media mentions and press coverage, click to view the Media page or the News category. Do you want to interview Wolf for a similar article? Contact Wolf through his media request form.

VeriFace Facial Recognition

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Some modern notebooks come with facial recognition. A face being something you have, of course. This can be paired with a Windows password (what you know) for two-factor security.

This is not strong two factor security as facial recognition, at least as currently implemented, is susceptible to a wide range of attacks. A presentation at Blackhat covered these vulnerabilities in detail.

J Wolfgang Goerlich

 

YouTube – Face Recognition Commercial Lenovo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2a0KYtG97E

BlackHat: Your face is NOT your password