Cybersecurity Credentials Innovation

Takeaways from Identity Week 2023

John Ellingson
John Ellingson

Last week, QWERX's founder team attended Identity Week in Washington DC. We saw many remarkable technologies designed to authenticate the identity of human users by placing their biometric imprimaturs on sophisticated credentials and then verifying and validating those credentials. While these technologies were impressive, this approach to identity management only scratches the surface of the digital ecosystem. The reality is that human users are all analog and exist outside of the digital universe. The products and processes seen at this event underscored the interface between the human analog and digital ecosystems. 

In the digital realm, time moves at lightning speed, with events measured in mere fractions of seconds. Human users, on the other hand, operate at a much slower pace, measuring time in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. While humans can comprehend and interact with events they can see and experience in their daily lives, the digital world operates on a completely different scale, measuring events in terms of megabits, gigabits, terabits, and beyond.

User security exists in physical space. Digital security lives in the space occupied by electrons.

 

After decades of attending similar events, we left with the sense that the gap between the human physical security space and the digital security space remains as wide today as ever. We can link human identities to their information in digital space, but we cannot secure it with human paradigms and technologies that magnify human limitations. Human identity should not have a significant role to play in network security. It can secure the interface between humans and the devices on the network, and the associations with information that traverses and is stored on the network. Depending on validating human identity is a vulnerability when it comes to securing the network itself.
John Ellingson

John Ellingson

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John Ellingson is the Chief Technology Officer at QWERX. John started his digital career with the Boeing Company working on the 747 aircraft in the late 1960s. He became a computer-literate attorney performing what is today known as forensic accounting. As the founding chairman of the ABA/YLD Subcommittee on Tax Treatment in Bankruptcy, John worked with the Congressional Joint Tax Committee to create the Internal Revenue Code Provision enabling the tax-free merger and acquisition of debtor corporations. This law became part of the Bankruptcy Tax Act of 1980. John had a national M&A practice in this area and obtained the first IRS Private Letter Ruling on this Code section. As a result of this practice, he observed a frequent element of white-collar crime in many bankruptcy cases, and he subsequently developed and patented a method to detect identity fraud. The product derived from that patent is still deployed at most retail banks throughout the U.S. today. This success started John on a path of protecting digital systems and identity management. He continued in this role with American Operations Corporation and ASM Research before founding infOsci LLC and later QWERX, Inc. John holds numerous method patents in digital system security. John was appointed to the United States Air Force Academy and medically separated before graduation. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin and a Juris Doctor degree from Seattle University. For 20 years John served as a liaison officer with the United States Naval Academy and the United States Military Academy. He also served on the Service Academy Selection Boards for two U.S. Senators.

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