Unplugged Episode #18: Linux Authentication
Video Transcript
Mike Engle:Hi, I'm Mike Engle, chief strategy officer at 1Kosmos, and welcome to our Unplugged series. Today we're going to talk about Linux authentication. As I'm sure you know, Linux hosts some of the most important functions in an organization along with domain controllers and privilege account systems they need to be protected. The way we protect most of these systems is with a username and a password. Sometimes you have MFA. Even if you have multifactor authentication, the fact that you still have a username and password creates a vector that bad actors can take advantage of. So at 1Kosmos, we're bridging the gap between usability and security by getting rid of the password and creating a single touch MFA experience that's rooted in a real world identity. Let's take a look. We'll show you how it works. Once a user puts in their username, they could be prompted with multiple options depending on what's been enabled for them.
In this example, we're going to pick something called a push message with live ID. Once they select this, the user will get a message on their mobile authenticator. They'll select it, and within a second they are performing a live ID authentication. Live ID is our real biometric that proves who the user is at the other end of the connection. This live ID is compared to a reference selfie that was enrolled earlier in the process, and that's it. You can now know that this person is the authorized user. And of course, as you saw, that user experience is amazing, especially when compared to username, password, and again, if you're lucky, the fragmented MFA experience that we suffer through today. So there you have it. Thanks for joining our episode, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.