Show Notes
Jeff Steadman sits down with Andi Hindle, conference chair for Authenticate 2026, for a preview of this year's event. Making his seventh appearance on the show, Andi walks through how Authenticate has evolved since its founding alongside Identiverse and outlines six major topic areas shaping the 2026 agenda, including passkeys in practice, regulatory pressures, security and standards architecture, digital identity wallets, and non-human authentication. The conversation moves into hardware-based identity for retail and industrial settings, age verification challenges, and a detour into 3D printing and supply chain assurance. Jeff and Andi dig into continuous identity and zero standing privilege, the shift toward non-human traffic dominating infrastructure requests, and how agentic AI is forcing organizations to rethink authorization and human-in-the-loop decisions. They close with privacy and consent questions for non-human identities, thoughts on where authentication and authorization standards are headed, and a lighter look at Authenticate team traditions and sci-fi recommendations.
Connect with Andi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahindle/
Impact of GDPR on Identity and Access Management by Andi Hindle: https://bok.idpro.org/article/id/24/
Learn more about FIDO Authenticate 2026: https://authenticatecon.com/event/authenticate-u-s-2026/ Non-FIDO members can use the code IDAC15 to save 15% on their in-person conference pass.
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
Jim McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmcdonaldpmp/
Jeff Steadman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsteadman/
Visit the show on the web at http://idacpodcast.com
00:10 - Introduction and discount code rundown for upcoming conferences 01:10 - Andi Hindle returns for his seventh appearance 01:29 - Favorite episode banter and the running Andrew Shikiar joke 03:08 - Origins of Authenticate and its relationship with Identiverse 09:01 - Passkeys are solved, so what comes next 09:53 - Lessons learned building the Authenticate agenda 12:59 - The scale of effort behind running Authenticate 15:29 - Adjacent topics expanding beyond the core passkeys mission 16:09 - Six major topic areas planned for Authenticate 2026 22:13 - Identity as the foundation for everything digital 23:14 - Hardware identity and non-human authentication 24:53 - Retail tokens, badges, and age verification use cases 28:36 - Replacing things only when the replacement is actually better 29:41 - A detour into 3D printing and personal satisfaction 31:39 - 3D printing, supply chain assurance, and identity problems 36:38 - Introducing continuous identity 37:28 - Zero standing privilege and why it matters now 40:46 - The human user as the infrastructure edge case 45:16 - Speed, scale, and the limits of human in the loop 46:11 - Setting red lines for agentic risk 50:56 - Privacy and consent questions for non-human identities 56:51 - Anonymization, data logging, and GDPR parallels 59:51 - A GDPR and IAM resource from the IDPro Body of Knowledge 1:00:26 - What Authenticate topics might look like three years out 1:04:59 - Why accounts may not make sense for agents 1:06:49 - Authorization as the next hard problem to solve 1:08:20 - Inside jokes from the Authenticate organizing team 1:09:30 - The story behind Andi's favorite Britishism 1:10:38 - Book and media recommendations 1:14:39 - Closing thoughts and sign-off
IDAC, Identity at the Center, Jeff Steadman, Jim McDonald, Andi Hindle, Authenticate 2026, FIDO Alliance, passkeys, identity verification, identity wallets, continuous identity, zero standing privilege, agentic identity, non-human identity, authorization, shared signals, GDPR, IDPro, Identiverse, age verification, hardware authentication
More from Identity at the Center
Most cloud security incidents trace back to the customer, and most of those trace back to identity. Jeff and Jim sit down with Mike Small, Senior Analyst at KuppingerCole, to unpack Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) and why identity practitioners should care. Mike explains how identity controls in the cloud have become data defined in code, why ephemeral workloads break traditional scan-then-deploy security, and how CNAPP evolved from static configuration analysis into runtime monitoring and SOC integration. The conversation covers the shared responsibility model, SOC 2 attestations and complementary user entity controls, multi-cloud complexity, and why standards matter for portability and sovereignty. Mike also looks at CNAPP as a security plane for AI, agents as another layer of non-human identity, recent market consolidation, and the cloud as national critical infrastructure. Plus, a detour into amateur radio, Morse code exams, and low-power QRP contacts across the Atlantic.
Bojan Simic, co-founder and CEO of HYPR, returns to Identity at the Center for a Sponsor Spotlight conversation with Jim McDonald. Bojan traces HYPR's path from passwordless authentication to a broader set of identity assurance controls and explains how assurance differs from verification across the full employee lifecycle. He describes what organizations find when they look for worker impersonators, from remote employees outsourcing their jobs to North Korean operatives, and why verification has to continue past day one. The conversation then turns to AI agents: why IAM teams are becoming the HR of AI, how agent identity differs from human identity, why humans can't manually govern agents at scale, and why securing MCP alone misses the full context of an agent's session. Bojan also covers what is slowing passwordless adoption, adaptive risk, alert fatigue, and how identity teams and the SOC can work together. This episode was made possible with support from HYPR.
Eve Maler, founder of Venn Factory and author of Mastering Digital Identity, joins Jim McDonald and Jeff Steadman for her tenth appearance on Identity at the Center. Eve shares what she has learned since the book came out, from writing for non-technical executives (and keeping AI out of the manuscript) to the strange places identity ends up on the org chart. The conversation covers treating identity as a product, why identity can be a business model in disguise, how CISOs can influence CIAM when they are not the boss of it, and the identity debt that AI is now calling due. Eve also explains why intent looks more like purpose of use than finer-grained authorization, how contract language can help frame agent mandates, what trust means to humans versus security teams, and the early work on UMA for Agents (U4A) to govern third-party agents through a resource-centric, protect surface mindset. The episode wraps with travel tips from all three frequent flyers.
Shea McGrew, Chief Technology Officer at Maricopa County, returns to Identity at the Center one year after episode 376 to take on a question she first raised at our Identity After Dark session: when does digital identity become critical infrastructure? Jeff and Jim talk with Shea about how a county broadband and digital equity project led her to see digital trust as the thread running through every digital government service, and why that trust depends on identity. The conversation covers building an external identity portal for residents, designing for consent and privacy from the start, why residents extend trust to private platforms more readily than to government, the right to be forgotten, data governance across departments, and where decentralized identity and verifiable credentials might fit. Shea also shares her view on access reviews as a learning journey, what it would take to trust AI agents with certifications, and whether an agent could ever be considered a citizen. Plus, potatoes and the proper way to cut a sandwich.
Alex Bovee, CEO and co-founder of C1.ai (formerly ConductorOne), returns for his third appearance on Identity at the Center. Alex walks Jim and Jeff through the rebrand to C1.ai and why the .ai matters: identity now covers humans, workloads, and agents. The conversation opens on launch week and the new App Hub, built around a question many CIOs and CISOs are facing. What happens when everyone in the company becomes a builder and vibe-coded apps start running critical workflows?