Authentication is the cloud marring metaverse’s future. Who’s addressing it?

Business consultants can be quick to point out that “metaverse” cannot be spelled without the letters t, e, a and m. But it is just as insightful to say it cannot be spelled without s, t, a, r, v and e, which is what a lot of early investors are going to do if the digital identity puzzle is not solved soon.

Some recent messaging on the topic makes the case that there still is more blue-skying going on than enterprise infrastructure-building.

Neville Burdan, a regional security leader for consultancy DXC Technology, contributed a metaverse column to the trade publisher GovInsider saying that “now is the time to prepare” for the metaverse.

Burdan explains that zero trust and digital trust strategies need to be standard operating procedures for a healthy metaverse. Shared responsibility models are needed for all risks, too. And the accurate attribution of wrongs in the virtual world has to be worked out.

His metaverse wish list also includes at least cross-border, if not universal, standards for issues like privacy and data transfer.

Noted, but addressing these challenges is a daily task for the industry, regulators, courts and journalists. A map to achieving success is what is needed.

Voice biometrics software vendor Kardome has posted a fairly long piece about the future of the metaverse. Speech recognition will be a central technology in a digital world that likely will not have keyboards, so Kardome executives are like many others who boost the metaverse as a growth strategy.

But Kardome’s view is much like Burdan’s. There is something great on the way and we need to innovate to profit from it. But other than trying to attach its name to an exciting, fuzzy possibility, there is little to pick up and use from the piece.

Meanwhile, computer trade publication EE Times carried some analysis from the editor-in-chief of a sister publication that summed up one viewpoint. The editor said a health care industry keynote at a recent vendor conference left him “both excited and disillusioned.”

The editor, Nitin Dahad, was thrilled by the “aspirational opportunities” of the keynote but felt let down by how different reality is.

The industry must look at “future authentication technologies more seriously” if constant connections to the metaverse are going to become common, Dahad writes.

One takeaway he gained from the conference five key concepts that need to be addressed and none of them was something like, be more secure.

One of the concepts was of continuous authentication, and it included capture, feature extraction, storage, classification and decision, but these are part of most training models.

Not new, but at least more addressable than admiration for a blue sky.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometrics  |  Kardome  |  metaverse  |  voice biometrics  |  web3