npoturnak

Thank you for taking a look. Magic plays in a different market. There are primarily 2 markets for identity - consumer identity and enterprise identity.

Consumer identity - you are developing a scheduling application. You need to log the users in into your platform. You can build the auth layer yourself, or get an SDK from someone like Magic / Stytch / Auth0 to outsource authentication. Magic offers SDKs for logins with magic links and web3 wallets.

Enterprise identity - you run a company of 100 employees. They are remote and need to access a variety of systems, including on-premises apps, servers, etc. This is where we come is helping you centralize, manage, and secure employee access to anything.

In summary - magic helps with authenticating users to your application. We help with authenticating your employees to company resources.

Ping Identity is heavily enterprise centric. Have on-premises and cloud offerings. Great for SAML Single Sign-On. Ping Identity does not do anything for infrastructure access. You have to have a separate product for that.

Thanks for taking a look. Both are great platforms indeed. To my knowledge StrongDM is only connectivity, no passwordless authentication to downstream resources. We offer similar functionality to that of Teleport, but try to abstract complexity such as managing yaml files and manual configurations.

Infrastructure is only part of the story for us, as we offer SAML SSO, Password Vault, Radius, our own MFA.

Great perspective, thank you for sharing. I might agree with this statement in the context of consumer authentication - when I am accessing my personal apps, websites, etc. Especially e-commerce is sensitive to login friction.

In my opinion in the business / workplace setting, "simple" has additional context to consider, such as how do you distribute a password to an employee, how do you pair password with MFA, how you manage the user records, what happens when employee forgets the password, who do you call when you need to reset a password or MFA, etc.

Therefore taking a mobile app and scanning a QR code to login is not quite hard after all...

Thank you for your question.

We do not touch or manage biometric data.

When you use our Passwordless MFA mobile application to login, you use Face ID to unlock the certificate in the hardware backed storage, and then that certificate is used to authenticate user to our platform. Biometrics processing is happening only on end user devices.

Thank you for reading through the security paper. Please find relevant points that explains the product security.

1. We have been very diligent and do not expose any sensitive user related metadata in any public api that is unauthenticated. The API's are protected using authenticated session that are established with unphishable passwordless MFA.

2. There are multiple things to highlight here. First of all, the user credentials use client-side cryptography and there are no keys in the cloud infrastructure to decrypt for attacker or even idemeum team. Second, the credentials are protected with AEAD that adds an additional integrity and authenticity check on the encrypted data. Third, we have diligently provisioned the cloud infrastructure using private vpc, subnets, security groups and role-based access that makes it harder for attacker.

3. idemeum password vault does not persist the user key in the extensions local storage. The key is broken into shares using cryptographic algorithm and distributed using multiple parties. the key is reassembled when a sufficient number of shares are combined and is used on-demand when required and discarded.

4. saving the recovery in the third-party cloud is optional. users can choose to save the recovery key in their personal backup if needed.

To my knowledge Cloud Flare is about connectivity and authorization. They outsource authentication to external identity provider (Okta, etc.) and do not actually log you into downstream resources. Cloud Flare can also do basic device posture telemetry, meaning identifying risky devices and blocking access from those devices.

idemeum on the other hand covers access end to end - connectivity through proxy, passwordless authentication to downstream resource (for example certificate based auth for SSH servers), granular authorization policies, and auditing including sessions recordings.

You can think of Cloud Flare Access as remote access solution.

idemeum is remote access + SAML identity Provider + password vault.

Thank you for taking a look, appreciate feedback.

In an ideal world we would like to be passwordless 100%. And we can already do that with SAML/OIDC apps, SSH, etc. For these flows passwords do not exist.

However, the companies we work with always have some legacy app that just does not support modern identity protocols. For that we have to fill passwords and provide vaulting capabilities to offer end to end experience. The reason we decided to add vault is to make things simple and integrated, so that company does not need to manage separate product. Agreed, 1P and some others are known-and-trusted, but we hope to earn this trust over time. And using our Vault is optional.

Right now we are planning to release RDP support for Windows servers, and then we were planning to focus on adding support for databases. That is why your feedback is critical as we can reassess the priorities regarding Kubernetes.