Sean Frazier is Advisory CISO, Federal at Cisco’s Duo Security. In his role, Sean acts as the voice of the CISO for Duo's federal business. Prior to joining Duo, Sean spent more than 25 years working in technology and public sector security for companies such as Netscape, LoudCloud/Opsware, Proofpoint, Cisco & MobileIron. Sean has helped lead numerous projects used by the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community, including the Fortezza Crypto Card, Defense Messaging System (DMS) and many others. He also has extensive experience in identity and public key infrastructure (PKI), network, applications, mobile and IoT. Sean has testified in front of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on the importance of public/private partnership in protecting the nation’s digital infrastructure. Sean also advises public/private partnership working groups including ACT-IAC, ATARC and many others.
Even with nearly everyone working from home, government guidance and policy folks have been hard at work to modernize our ability to deliver a holistic, risk-based security framework. Modernization, we are coming for you!
Thankfully technology never stands still. While the government has struggled with their passwordless journey over the last 16 years, the commercial world, struggling under the constant barrage of credential breach after credential breach and after relying for years on the password as the only thing standing between an attacker and their data, finally cried uncle. From this pain, WebAuthn was born.
2020 has added a new wrinkle that may force us to conduct elections in ways we haven’t seen before: more mail-in voting and, dare I say, casting ballots using our phones. It is vital to protect democracy, and the good news is doing so does not have to be complicated.
Remote work in the federal space is not a wholly new concept. Yes, it presents a set of challenges in a sector not commonly known for its flexibility and adaptability. But when it comes down to it, we can empower the federal workforce to unite. In short: we’ve got this.
This is the preparation for the day where we no longer have to live with passwords as a security construct. I think it’s safe to say that this will be a happy change that we will all embrace. But the “how do we get there?” part is still a little TBD.
