Continuous Authentication HAS To Be Multi-Factor

If you authenticate a person at the beginning of a session and never authenticate them again, you have a huge security hole.

For example, you may authenticate an adult delivery person and then find a kid illegally making your delivery. 31,000 Brazilians already know how to do this.

By LukaszKatlewa – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49248622.

That’s why more secure firms practice continuous authentication for high-risk transactions.

But continuous authentication can be intrusive.

How would you feel if you had to press your finger on a fingerprint reader every six seconds?

Grok.

Enough of that and you’ll start using the middle finger to authenticate.

Even face authentication is intrusive, if it’s 3 am and you don’t feel like being on camera.

Now I’ve already said that Amazon doesn’t want to over-authenticate everything. 

Grok.

But Amazon does want to authenticate the critical transactions. Identity Week: 

“Amazon treats authentication as a continuous process, not a one-time event. It starts with verifying who a user is at login, but risk is assessed throughout the entire session, watching for unusual behaviours or signals to ensure ongoing confidence in the user’s identity.”

That’s right: Amazon uses “somewhat you why” as an authentication factor.

I say they’re smart.

I Updated My Biometric Product Marketing Expert Page on Friday

Late on Friday, I spent some time updating the links on my “Biometric Product Marketing Expert” page.

I now link to over 100 posts on biometry, biometrics, finger, face, iris, voice, DNA, other biometric modalities, non-biometric factors, and non-person entities.

And I will start to reshare the best of them on my Bredemarket Identity Firm Services Facebook group and LinkedIn page, as well as my personal LinkedIn page. Because you probably haven’t seen them before.

First up: a post about Amanda Knox and DNA. Stay tuned.

Biometric product marketing expert
John E. Bredehoft, Biometric Product Marketing Expert.

End of Life: It Marketed From The Dead

In which I rip off something from Gene Volfe and create a Halloween-themed product end of life video. Actually, two of them.

I’m not a huge fan of Halloween except for the nail on the door part (IYKYK), but I know a lot of you are.

If you love the spookiness, or if you love the sexy [INSERT JOB TITLE HERE] outfits, more power to you.

And if you love Halloween AND demand generation, then you should see what Gene Volfe is up to.

I have worked with Gene at Incode and two other companies, where I provided content for his demand generation efforts.

Anyway, Gene is publishing insightful demand generation posts on LinkedIn, each accompanied by a Halloween themed short reel. You can see the latest installment on content syndication here; the others are on his LinkedIn profile.

As I saw his posts, I thought to myself that I could steal his idea.

No, not with a sexy product marketer costume.

I decided to make a short reel about a product’s “end of life.”

End of life is something that vendors love and their customers hate. Go ask a current Windows 10 user about end of life mandates.

I have had a vendor view of end of life as a product manager, when Motorola declared an end of life on Series 2000 in favor of Printrak BIS. Series 2000 depended upon old Digital UNIX computers, even for the workstations, making it difficult to maintain the peripherals when everyone else was using Windows. But our competitors had a field day saying that Motorola was abandoning its customers.

But enough about that. Here is Bredemarket’s Halloween-themed product end of life video. Actually, I created two of them.

Grok. Version 1.
Grok. Version 2.

The Temperamental Writer in Action, October 2025 Edition

While transferring text from a reviewer’s copy to my master for a recent project, I inserted the following temporary comment into my master:

And yes, I used the Oxford comma to preserve the integrity of George Washington, a seamstress and a pirate.

And there’s one comment I didn’t make in writing. I just voiced it.

DON’T PUT TWO SPACES AFTER PERIODS.

Temperamental writers are temperamental, after all.

Four Colors, Compact

When I was growing up some time ago, application of multiple colors to a piece of paper was performed by hand.

  • If young children wanted to create a crayon picture with four colors, they would grab four crayons.
  • If someone was painting, they would get four colors of paint.
  • But if someone were practicing penmanship, they would only need a single pen.

Yes, a single pen that wrote in red, green, blue, and black.

The BIC 4-Color Pen.

“The BIC 4-Color Pen was ingeniously crafted to allow the user to switch between ink colors without the need to swap pens. This was made possible due to a singular mechanism, employing precision springs, that helped in selecting the color of choice. Constructed from durable technical plastics, the pen could endure countless color changes.”

And the clicking sound and feel was enjoyable.

(Picture source: https://us.bic.com/en_us/bic-4-color-original-retractable-ball-pen-assorted-12-pack.html )

Sometimes You Don’t Need, Or Want, Identity Assurance Level 3 (IAL3)

This post is specifically for firms that sell identity verification solutions at various identity assurance levels, or IALs.

I have written a post entitled “Identity Assurance Level 3 (IAL3): When Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2) Isn’t Good Enough.”

Which naturally implies that IAL3 is better than IAL2, because it’s more secure.

So why doesn’t EVERYONE use IAL3?

For the same reason that childrens’ piggy banks aren’t protected with multiple biometric modalities AND driver’s license authentication.

Grok.

Kids don’t have driver’s licenses anyway. 

In the same vein, in-person or remote supervised identity proofing isn’t always necessary. If your business would lose customers by insisting upon IAL3, and you’re OK with assuming the financial risk, don’t do it.

Grok.

Imagine if you had to get on a video chat and show your face and your driver’s license before EVERY Amazon purchase. Customers would go elsewhere. Amazon would go broke within days.

Which is why some identity firms promote IAL3, while others promote IAL2. (I won’t talk about the firms that promote IAL1.)

Grok.

Whatever identity assurance level your prospects need, Bredemarket can help you create the content. Let’s talk about your specific needs.