You know how they say that it takes 1,000 attempts before you get good at something?
By that count, I have roughly 950 attempts to go before I get good at reels.
Because the wildebeest is musical, my most recent reel about the drawbacks of name-based identity verification and authentication (shared at the end of this article) touches on some musicians.
For example, in the 1970s you could be forgiven if you confused Bob Welch, the man who saved Fleetwood Mac and then left it to become a solo artist, with Bob Welch, the baseball pitcher who faced both Reggie Jackson and alcoholism.
But that's nothing compared to Mick Jones.
- You know, Mick Jones the rocker.
- OK, Mick Jones the rock guitarist.
- OK, Mick Jones the English rock guitarist.
- Unfortunately, there are TWO Mick Joneses who are English rock guitarists: the one from Foreigner, and the one from the Clash.
I even have a personal story on this end.
- You'll notice that on LinkedIn I intentionally use my middle initial.
- Not that "John Bredehoft" is that common a name, but I wanted to ensure that my wildebeest-infused content does not embarrass other John Bredehofts, such as a Virginia lawyer or an Alabama plumber.
- Sadly the Alabama plumber is no longer with us, and when I read his obituary, I discovered that his middle initial was E. So even my attempt to differentiate my not-so-common name failed.
As I note in the reel, and in the companion blog post I just shared on the Bredemarket website, a unique identification relies on multiple factors.
Ideally you should use more than one of these. Using multiple factors reduces the likelihood of spoofing, because while it's possible to spoof any one factor, it's much harder to spoof more of them.
Again, the factors are as follows:
- Something You Know. Think “password.” And no, passwords aren’t dead. But the use of your mother’s maiden name as an authentication factor is hopefully decreasing.
- Something You Have. I’ve spent much of the last ten years working with this factor, primarily in the form of driver’s licenses. (Yes, MorphoTrak proposed driver’s license systems. No, they eventually stopped doing so. But obviously IDEMIA North America, the former MorphoTrust, has implemented a number of driver’s license systems.) But there are other examples, such as hardware or software tokens.
- Something You Are. I’ve spent…a long time with this factor, since this is the factor that includes biometrics modalities (finger, face, iris, DNA, voice, vein, etc.). It also includes behavioral biometrics, provided that they are truly behavioral and relatively static.
- Something You Do. The Cybersecurity Man chose to explain this in a non-behavioral fashion, such as using swiping patterns to unlock a device. This is different from something such as gait recognition, which supposedly remains constant and is thus classified as behavioral biometrics.
- Somewhere You Are. This is an emerging factor, as smartphones become more and more prevalent and locations are therefore easier to capture. Even then, however, precision isn’t always as good as we want it to be. For example, when you and a few hundred of your closest friends have illegally entered the U.S. Capitol, you can’t use geolocation alone to determine who exactly is in Speaker Pelosi’s office.
Enough text. Here's the reel. Enjoy. And come back when I've created 950 more of them.
