BSIDES SEATTLE 2025: REBUILDING TRUST IN SYSTEMS IN THE AGE OF NHIS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

The BSides Seattle 2025 cybersecurity conference focused on rebuilding trust in a landscape dominated by non-human identities (NHIs). Key figures, including Wendy Nather, Heather Flanagan, and Maya Kaczorowski, emphasized that most security systems fail due to unrealistic expectations of human behavior, overlooking the fact that non-human identities, such as APIs and service accounts, outnumber humans and possess greater privileges. The conference advocated for a shift to contextual identity models based on attestation, recommending ephemeral, task-bound identities with minimal privileges that can be cryptographically verified.