One of the things that I think has been most disappointing to me in technology over the last few decades is the lack of progress is managing security keys and certificates. There hasn't been a really good method designed that works well at scale for disparate organizations.
Recently at the DevConnections conference, I saw a talk where Mark Minasi talked about the future of tablets and smartphones, where he mentioned the idea that we will use many devices in the future that don't necessarily need to connect to the domain inside a company. They'll still authenticate, but with certificates.
That would be the ideal situation for me, a world where we individually have multiple certificates that identify us, and allow us to have secure communications, layers of security for different purposes, and a way to easily revoke, change, and add new certificates as needed. I'd be able to use easily manage certificates across devices to provide some level of authentication.
As we move to the deep intermixing of user and company devices, it does start to make sense that we consider using a more ad hoc authentication scheme that can be deployed in a more distributed fashion, rather than the monolithic, authenticate to the domain completely or not at all, scheme we have now.
I don't have a solution worked out, but I know there are some very smart security people out there and I'd hope that they are working on a variety of solutions that will increase the security we have, while allowing us lots of flexibility.
Steve Jones
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