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This Thanksgiving I'm Thankful for Government Regulation

Now, don't let the title fool you, I am a firm believer that government is a corrupt money suck. But occasionally, the blind squirrel that is government, finds a nut. The nut in this case is privacy regulation. You have probably heard acronyms like CCPA and GDPR but might not be too familiar with what they are. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are both milestones in the struggle for consumers rights. When you cut down the endless pages of nuance and typical government babel, it breaks down into rights.  The CCPA outlines the right to know, right to delete, right to opt-out, and right to non-discrimination. The right to know is how it sounds. It gives consumers the right to know what information a business collects and how it is used or shared. The right to delete means that consumers have the right to request that data pertaining to them be deleted. This one has some exceptions. Some data is required to be kept in accordance...
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Passwordless Authentication

You may have heard about the future being "passwordless", but what does that mean? Essentially it means that you dont have to come up with some combination of your pets name and favorite child's birthday then toss an exclamation point on the end. Instead, your password will now be a pair of keys. The first of the keys in your pair is your private key. To simplify it, you can think of your private key as a bunch of gibberish written down on a bit of paper and locked inside a combination safe. The second key in your pair is the public key. The public key is meant to be shared and can be thought of something like your name. Your name is who you are, but if someone takes your name, its no big deal because you are still you. Now to get complicated again, lets go into how it works with computers. You join the pilot of a super security minded social media platform, lets call it InstaGran, the leading platform for keeping in touch with granny. When you go to InstaGran on your phone and click the sign in, you wont be prompted with a password anymore. InstaGran will use your public key and prompt you to authenticate your private key. This will be done by using something that is who you are or something only you have. As a result, you will be prompted for your finger print or face scan. As long as you still have the finger or face you enrolled with, InstaGran will match your public key with your private key and let you keep in touch with that sweet old lady. It sounds great right? No more passwords, just keep your face and fingers and youre all set? While that is techinally true, we cant forget about quantum computing. I know quantum sounds like some term that that is tossed in front of anything to make it sound Sci-Fi but its a real thing but it is real. The more these computers become available, the easier it will be for people to use them maliciously. Think of them like super safe crackers who are going after your gibberish written down. While passwordless authentication is a move in the right direction of for the good guys, quantum computing has the eventuality of being a move in the wrong direction for the bad guys. Now I'm not trying to scare you, I am just trying to put things into perspective. For every advance in technology, there is some jackwagon out there who will find a way to use it to go after your granny. Luckily as long as there are good people in cybersecurity who want to protect grannys, there is hope. Technology is always advancing and the goal of cybersecurity professionals is to impliment new ideas like passwordless authentication to try to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. I know when I first heard about the idea of passwordless authentication, I was very intrigued so I figured I would share some information about it with you all. Now if you hear your security team talking about going passwordless you can say with confidence "I know enough".
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