103. Your zero trust is running on a sticker (with Roei Ganzarski)

Roei Ganzarski is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Alitheon, the Bellevue, Washington company behind FeaturePrint, and he isn’t a founder of it. He calls himself a mercenary CEO, which is the fourth time he’s been brought into a group of mathematicians and physicists who built something remarkable and then wanted a different set of skills in the building. His degree is in economics and finance. He says the pleasure of the job is usually being the least smart person in the room, and his rule for the team is that they don’t have to explain it to their mother, they have to explain it to him.

What Alitheon does is biometrics for things. The argument starts with people. We used to identify a human with a badge or a passport, then governments worked out that a proxy can be lost, transferred, faked or manipulated, so they moved to fingerprints and irises instead. A twin can carry his brother’s real driver’s license into a real building, and the document is real and the person is real, and the link between them is the lie. Physical products are still stuck at the proxy stage. A barcode, or a hologram that reads as authentic mostly because it’s shiny and the picture changes when you tilt it.

The mechanism is worth hearing him explain. No machine can make the same thing twice, so design engineers publish a tolerance band, and everything inside that band passes quality control and looks identical and works identically. Alitheon’s math reads the differences that are still there inside that band, and turns them into what they call a FeaturePrint. The fingerprint exists because the thing was manufactured, which means it can’t be peeled off, swapped, or re-issued with the paperwork. He puts the odds of 2 products carrying the same manufacturing signature at one in six and a half trillion. It runs on off-the-shelf industrial cameras, there’s no training phase, and he says there’s no machine learning anywhere in it. His words are discrete mathematics.

Then host Jon McLachlan, co-founder of YSecurity and Cyberbase.ai, puts his security hat on and asks about hardware tampering in transit, and Roei makes the argument this episode is titled after. Zero trust says verify everything connecting to your network. The cyber runs on hardware. And the hardware is trusted because a sticker says who made it and where. He’s presented this to rooms of cybersecurity people who told him hardware isn’t their problem.

The 4 markets he sells into are all versions of one idea he cal