SIA New Member Profile: Allthenticate

New Security Industry Association (SIA) member Allthenticate provides an all-in-one access control and authentication solution for companies that is designed to be cost-effective, easy to use and secure. The company was founded out of Santa Barbara, California, and recently opened a second office in Houston, Texas.  

SIA spoke with Allthenticate Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Rita Mounir about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

Rita Mounir: Our CEO and co-founder, Chad Spensky, became enthralled with the idea of using smartphones to replace passwords as the primary form of authentication while he was a computer security graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During his career as a computer security researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the scope of this dream expanded to not only replace passwords but to replace all authentication mechanisms, both physical and digital. The idea of magically unlocking doors, computers, websites and cars when you approach them and without extra security hurdles was born.

In 2019, I joined him to help take that dream to the masses. Allthenticate, the company, first made itself known in the University of California, Santa Barbara New Venture Competition, a university-wide startup pitch competition, where we went on to claim both first place overall and the People’s Choice Award. With this victory under our belt, an issued patent and an exceptional founding team, Allthenticate was ready to start creating the dream that Chad had a decade earlier: ubiquitous, usable authentication; Allthentication.

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings/company unique?

RM: Allthenticate is the first cybersecurity company to offer a single solution for both physical access control and digital authentication, replacing legacy systems such as keys, passwords, smart cards and other hardware tokens with a single, secure smartphone app. Our patented technology (Single Device Authentication) is based on over 10 years of research and is highly configurable to keep the usability vs. security balance in check. For example, doors can be configured to unlock automatically or require a biometric, based on time of day or person.

Similarly, computers and websites can be configured to log in automatically if the phone is nearby but require a PIN to perform a sensitive operation (e.g., send money). Finally, our customers can manage all of their resources in our simple-to-use, cloud-based admin portal, unifying the employees and users’ identities and making Allthenticate the one-stop shop for all of a company’s authentication needs.

What is something we might not know about your company – or something new you are doing in security?

RM: We provide a fully distributed hardware-backed authentication ecosystem, where users only need one app (The Allthenticator app) to unlock their doors, computers, websites and even company cars. And to top it all off, users can store their SSH keys in their phones, in a much more secure manner than the traditional way, and log every instance the SSH keys are used and can even require certain user interactions for specific servers, which is pretty unique and novel. Moreover, Allthenticate is the authentication solution for web3.

What is your company’s vision, and what are your goals for the security industry?

RM: Our goal is to solve the “security poverty line.” What we mean by that is to enable small and medium-sized companies to have the best security solutions, instead of having them sacrifice security because of their limited budgets. The current market only allows big enterprises with huge budgets that can afford expensive security products to be protected.

What do you think are the biggest opportunities in the security industry right now?

RM: We believe usability is going to win. Most security products are extremely annoying to use, which results in employees using them the wrong way or not using them at all. Our goal is to rid the workforce of all annoying and time-consuming security products. Hence, our products are very easy to use, and unlock doors, computers and websites without requiring users to do any additional action.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

RM: SIA has been awesome with all the introductions they make and all the great opportunities. The security industry can get pretty lonely, so having a community is a game changer, and SIA does a great job with that. I have felt very welcomed by the SIA community since the first day, and I met some incredibly nice and talented people.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.