Identity Management Day 2025: Existential Identity with Jeff Reich

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back to Textron tv. Hope you're enjoying today's broadcast, uh, or if you're not watching this as part of a Textron TV broadcast, but you found it on our YouTube channel or on one of our sites.

Thanks for joining. I'm Alan Shimel, um, and I'm really happy to have my next guest on with me. His name is Jeff Reich.

I've known Jeff probably longer than him and I wanna admit to, but Jeff is the Executive Director of Identity Defined of the Identity Defined Security Alliance, the IDSA. Um, you know, every year they put on a great event, uh, identity Management Day. This year, of course, it's Identity Management Day 2025.

You wouldn't expect it to be 2024 or 2026, so it's 2025. Um, we're gonna hear all about that and more about what's going on as well as something we're calling existential identity if you can't read it behind Jeff there. But first, let's welcome my friend Jeff Reich, ex Ed for, uh, the IDSA.

Jeff, how are you? Welcome. I'm doing very well.

Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. And thank you for having us back.

You get us back every year for this, and we really appreciate it. We, we appreciate you and the, the good work that the IDSA does, Jeff, I, and that brings me right into it. Why don't we, for those of our audience maybe who are not familiar with the IDSA and with the Annual Identity Management Day, you know, give us, give us the quick pitch on this.

Sure. So, uh, IDSA is around six years old. It's a nonprofit.

It was started by a few identity vendors back then. And, uh, there was a founding executive director, um, she retired and I joined over two years ago. And we made a decision to say, you know, it's great to have identity vendors sit and talk to each other and, you know, maybe start collaborating all great things, but let's start bringing in some others.

So over the past couple years, especially the past year, we've now expanded to and, and drilled down. We now have, um, enterprises that just use identity solutions. Um, not identity providers.

We have partners that may do consulting and recommendations, but don't have an identity solution of their own. They're all part of IDSA now. And we've expanded our reach.

We have members now, I won't go through the whole list, but kind of going from, um, east to west, um, Australia, India, Israel, uh, Copenhagen, France, um, Egypt, I, I missed the, the map a bit there. Uh, the uk, Canada, us, uh, Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan. So we've really grown a bunch now globally, Which is good globally.

It's globally. And that is, and that's a great thing. And, and Jeff, I don't wanna embarrass you, but you know, a large part of that is due to you and your efforts, right?

You are a consummate networker professional. And, and, and a lot of it is due to the efforts of the whole organization, right? What you guys are doing to try to, to bring some standardization, to bring some community, if you will, to the whole identity management space.

Um, and a lot of that happens every year at your Identity Management Day event, right? Uh, this year it's April 8th, and I'm assuming it's virtual again. Everyone can log in around the world.

Yeah, It is. Now we do have one segment in Melbourne, Australia that is hybrid, where there is gonna be an in-person league. We did this last year with them as well.

Really? And, and it went off well. So there's going to be probably around a hundred people in a room in Melbourne.

Um, but that's also all gonna be streamed. So anyone can see that. And by the way, each session is recorded, so it's a 21 hour event.

It starts at Follow the Sun U tc. And I've had to my mind is now in UTC only because I, you just heard me list all the time zones I have to deal with. Um, and, and it's following people change your clocks at different times.

The US changed their clocks, uh, a week and a half ago. The EU changes it next week. Um, Australia changes it the week after.

No way to keep up with it. So UTC works. No, but yeah, we started UTC Absolutely works.

And, um, go through that. The sessions from Oceania Asia, which includes, you know, not only Australia, but also I think there is going to be a, at least a speaker from Malaysia. And we have one from Taiwan who's gonna actually be in the EMEA session.

So a good mix there. And then we go to strictly virtual through emea. And we have speakers there from Egypt Co, uh, Denmark, Germany, um, Taiwan will end up actually speaking there.

Um, so a, a good and someone from the US and then we come to the Americas and we have speakers from the US and from South America as well. So a really good mix. We have 44 sessions in it.

This is held always the second Tuesday of April every year. So next year we feel like we're getting a break 'cause it's April 14th next year. So, and I'm lying.

We're telling us we have an extra week. You gotta, we don't an extra week. Exactly.

Well, and the clocks will all be done by that. Yes. But, um, that, that's fantastic.

And it, you know, I, I've been involved in a few of the early DevOps, um, Mark Miller and, and, uh, Mark Miller and, and the Sona type folks. Derek Weeks used to do it, uh, all day. DevOps was similar to that.

24 hours. Follow the Sona around. Yep.

Um, Melbourne's a great city too. You're not gonna be there in person for that, are you? They wanted me there and I would've liked to have gone.

Um, this year wasn't gonna work, but we're already making arrangements to be there next year. Why not? Yeah's a great city.

Why not be where it launches? Right. Plus, you know, um, en enjoy Australia and possibly you hop to New Zealand as well.

So, uh, It's always, it's a great trip. Been done that a few times. Um, yeah.

And I, um, as have I, but I I, I wanna actually take some time now because, um, time I, I don't, I don't think I'm near the end of my clock run, but it is ticking. So I wanna get those, well, I wanna get those visits in as I can. Jeff.

Look in some ways, those of us in, in the tech industry and in roles like you have, and I have, we're blessed. We have traveled all over the world multiple times, but I realized about 10 years ago and maybe more, I, I had already started tech drunk that I had seen a lot of airports, a lot of hotels, and a lot of conference centers. But I never took the time to smell the Coffee of the Roses or whatever the saying is.

And about 10 years ago, I started extending my trips. If I was going to Melbourne, I'd spend a couple extra days in Melbourne and I'd also hop over to Sydney. And, you know, if I was in Sydney, I'd go to Melbourne or I'd, you know, jump somewhere else.

And in Europe you could do this really well, easily too. And, and I'm happy to say over the last 10 years, I've, you know, I've had my wife come out with me. We've seen the world a few times over a lot of places.

It's a wonderful opportunity for those that have it. Um, I, I don't regret a day. I've been to six continents and, um, yeah, I'd have to count the countries.

It's a long list. Like you, um, yeah. And I, I, I don't regret a second of it.

It was all, you know, you get to, it's great to have the opportunity to take in cultures and, and see what's different to what's similar. And that, I'm gonna use that as my segue to existential identity because we haven't talked about it yet. Way I was well as letting you go.

So what, what exactly is existential identity? So it's our theme for this year, but the more we work with it, we're beginning to think it may be the theme for IDSA. 'cause our, our mission at IDSA is to raise a level of awareness insecurity around identities.

And, and we do that through a number. We have research papers, we have working groups. We have a lot of different ways to do that.

org, the opportunity to take a look at everything's there and let get involved. Specifically though, for identity management day 2025, this year, we wanted to come up with what theme makes sense. And if you're around identity at all, um, in the past six months, you can't avoid the term NHI or non-human identities.

So we've actually, we facilitated, uh, a conference in January, uh, about NHIS and have expanded that. 'cause a lot of people think, oh, a non-human identity is a machine account, right? Or a service account.

Well, yeah, that's in there. But now if you take a look at it, it means so much more than that. Now, Alan, you know me well enough, and I, I like to thank you have reason to believe that this is actually me speaking with you.

Yeah. You're not a deep fake, I hope. Probably not.

Right? Right. But you and I know each other.

So there's the level of authentication that's already happened because of that. And we, this isn't why we did it, but we did reference this back to things we knew before. We know each other and we confirmed that we are each other.

But if you've met someone once or maybe never, and you have an interaction with like this, with them, the whole point is they want you to believe this is me. You don't really know that. There was a case last year where there was a video call of a CFO meeting with an employee of that same company.

They had never met authorizing a transfer of I think $2 million. Yeah, no, I think it was more than that. It was a, a six or seven.

You're talking about this case in Singapore. That's correct. Yes.

So, yep. That was crazy. Yeah.

And that's because there was an identity that couldn't be validated. Now we could talk about how do you authenticate someone and, and everything else. Um, I'm not here to talk about multi-factor authentication because that is, uh, although valuable, very overused and people are, are tired of it.

Actually, there, there is a a, a tire some, um, um, and, and it gets an always, sometimes NFA you do it like, oh really? I get the whole security thing. But All right, now I gotta go look at my phone for that six digt code.

So, So, um, we want to, our working groups wanna come up with ways. How do we make that more frictionless? Let's take the F out of MFA and that can mean a lot of things, but let's say it's stands for friction now.

And okay. And we wanna remove the friction. Hey, we've had discussions about this and we want to come up with what can we say and what do we feel?

They're different. But, um, let's Take the F-F-F-F-A. Okay.

Yeah. I, so I get it. Yep.

And So what do we think? What do you, but, but Jeff, we talk, I mean, 'cause I thought about this. You know, I think anyone who heard that Singapore case said, oh my God, we're, we're going to brave New World here.

Um, what do we, how do we prevent this? So there's a lot of ways that are going to be available to do this. And I know a lot of our members are working on that as products.

And I'm not here to, we're nonprofit. I'm not gonna endorse any given product, but there's a level of initial authentication that needs to happen. You identify who someone is, you authenticate who they are, do whatever method's gonna work for you.

And then you have a way of re authenticating that back to the original. You know, I think that's what we're gonna see going forward, rather than the true zero trust model, which works well as well. By the way, that says you have to assume every single interaction is brand new with no history.

And you have to start from the beginning. As good as that is for a highly sensitive environment. And I I'm mentioning this only because it's topical and near time in a highly sensitive environment, you have to be careful about not only what mechanisms you use, but identifying who you're dealing with.

And I'm referring to, to the recent case in the US of, um, plans that were revealed on a, on a, On a, the signal fiasco. Yes. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. Fine.

Um, but that to me, even though, you know, 'cause I've done, I've done federal work, pardon me, believes that I actually did, if I did that, I working there, I'd be in a cell waiting for a hearing. I, You, you, you said it, right? I mean, we, I, yeah.

But any case, absolutely. In any case, regardless of how that's adjudicated or not, it was a case of using a platform that that wasn't approved. But more importantly, not knowing who you're dealing with, they didn't identify and authenticate who was there.

So I'll, I'll still call that an identity issue, even though that wasn't the, the root cause. Um, if identity had been managed correctly, that could have been prevented or, or minimized anyway. Well, yeah.

I mean there, there's multiple, and I'm not here to dive into it, but you shouldn't have been using that platform to begin with. That is The root who's in your chat, right? Yeah.

All of the above. There were many and many points there. This thing could have been, you know, mitigated.

But, but nevertheless, the, the, the, the, the root issue, not the root issue of that particular incident. But the root issue here is identity. Yes.

It's existential identity. And how, how are we, you know, Jeff, you and I have been around the book. We've seen the rise of the internet.

We've seen the rise of really, of the computer. You know, we're both old enough to remember the rise of the computer age, right? The personal computer revolution and, and what, you know, what that wrought and then the internet and the cloud, you know, and, and now AI and robotic AI and agent ai and generative ai and general artificial intelligence and all these things that we're talking about.

And, you know, this is game change. This is again, sort of a new boundary for a new era of, of computing and of technology. And we need solutions.

I didn't even mention quantum yet. Yes. And, and you were, now that you said, I can say post quantum, but um, okay, go Ahead.

Post quantum, Um, you hit the nail on the head. That's what existential identity, that's what's behind it. Because any individual watching this, Alan, you and I may be in a different situation, but I think we're more aware.

But any individual watching this, you have non-human identities that you deal with. Uh, if, if you call for service somewhere and you get a call tree, that's a non-human identity you're listening to, um, yeah, because they're, they're asking you to enter your account information and they're doing something to process it, but it's not a person. There are machine accounts, there's work accounts.

What do you use when you're at work? What do you use when you bank, what do you use when you chat with your friends? All of those are identities.

So anyone that thinks I have, have an identity is, hasn't awoken themselves yet to what today is. It's, is the new age. I agree with you.

I think it's a good thing. Just like computers were just like, you know, um, client server was all the things that I remember people saying, no, that'll never happen. And well, if you stand on the, on the train track, you'll have the reverse impression of a, of a engine on your head, because that's what's gonna happen.

It's gonna roll over you regardless. This is gonna happen as well. And now we have so many segments of our identity that exist in different places.

If you gave your, um, sample to 23 and Me, your DNA is there and it's about to be sold, and we don't know who's gonna buy It, they're going bankruptcy. Saw that, right? Yeah.

Yep. So that's a segment of your identity, a big segment of your identity. So with all of that, how can you say, I know what my identity is and I can contain it.

You can't. It is, it has become existential. You don't really know where your identity exists.

And in fact, now that we're talking about DNA but won't get, none of our members really deal with DNA. And I'm not talking about DNA works in specific, but after each of us passes, our DNA exists, especially if you donated it somewhere and it's, and it's recorded so your identity carries on. So, yeah.

You know, in addition to that, with everything around what your identity means, and I'm not gonna get too philosophical here, but when you look at what's going on in the world right now, there are some very large major conflicts that are occurring that everyone is trying to say, how can we resolve this? And everyone's staring at each other saying, we, we don't seem to have an answer. But when you look at all that, we have to remember that each of us are one, but all of us are one as well.

And I'm not saying that this conference on April 8th is gonna solve world peace, but I do wanna raise a question. You know, this is a worldwide event and we are one for those 21 hours. That's a great, that's a great metaphor and a great sentiment, Jeff.

I I, I do agree with you. I agree with you. We are, you know, and again, back to our comment about traveling, that, that's my biggest takeaway from traveling the world, is that every, they're all, we're all humid and there's so much more we have in common than we have not in common that to be killing each other.

And, and what goes on in this world, the meanness and the pettiness and the everything. It, it, it's just ridiculous. Yeah.

You made an interesting comment though about our DNA survives our physical body. I read an article a week or two ago, but a service that will use AI and interview you for a couple of hours, not all at once, you know, they break it up an hour here, an hour there, but at the end of the time, they've interviewed you for eight, 10 hours and they take the, the sum of all those interviews and create an LLM out of it and train the ai, train an AI on it. And, you know, and obviously they can mimic your voice and your likeness, and you could live on as an ai, I, you don't really live on, don't get me wrong, but the, an AI with your LLM as, as a, as a, as the training, you know, universe, your relatives and loved ones can continue interacting with it when you're not here.

And, um, that's kind of freaky, right? Because I mean, how much further along are we from just downloading your brain patterns or what have you into a, a machine and, and, and doing that. Um, just a whole new era of identity.

The next one we'll be around for that one. Or maybe next year Your great grandchildren will be discussing that very topic. Yeah.

Yeah. And I may be discussing it with them, or some, we May be iteration Of me Now too far from you in St. Petersburg, uh, at the Salvador Dali Museum.

Sure. They have gen, they have that generated image of him answering questions. Really?

Yep. So with ai, it'll be a lot more. That's interesting.

Hey Jeff, we're almost outta time. But you know, all of these bigger issues aside, identity management day, big issues, smaller issues. If you're involved in the, or interested in identity management, it's a must attend event.

It is worldwide. How do people register for this? Still easy.

First of all, it's free. org. Couldn't be easier.

org. Yep. Go register.

It's April 8th. It starts at, uh, zero GMT, which I think is, isn't it about, is that about four in the morning or It's Cozy East Coast time. It's a four hour difference back, actually.

So it would be, um, Well, right now with East Yeah, it would be 8:00 PM 8:00 PM Um, Eastern Time is when it starts. Oh, okay. I went ahead.

Not backwards On, on Monday. On Monday the seventh. Technically, even though it'll already be Tuesday the eighth in Australia.

Now you know why I have to live in UTC. Yeah. No, that, yeah.

'cause that, that, that gets, there's just too much going on. Yep. Jeff, my friend, it's great to have you on.

It's great to see you continued success with the, uh, IDSA. We'll be watching and, and don't wait till next year's show to come back on. You'll have news before that.

Looking forward to, we have at the minimum a research paper coming out in September so we can get together and talk about that if not before. Alright, I'll be, I'm gonna hold you to that. Alright, Thank you Alan.

It's great seeing you Again. Always. Jeff Reich, executive director, identity Defined Security Alliance Identity Management Day 2025, April 8th.

It's just a week or two out here. A week and a half out. Find out what's going on with existential identity.

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