AUSTIN, TEXAS — A chief theme at this year's Ping YOUniverse conference Tuesday and Wednesday of last week (Sept. 1 and 2) was the notion of "verified trust," which Ping Identity views as the next stage of the authentication of humans. "Every step in the ID journey must evolve," said Ping Identity CEO and founder Andre Durand during his keynote Tuesday, adding that "trust must be earned through continuous validation." Durand said verified trust can be considered as the fusion of fraud detection, access management, and ID verification. Several Ping YOUniverse speakers later called it "the continuous verification of the human user at every stage of the journey." More than a login All agreed that verified trust goes much further than just logging into a service or device. To Ping, that's implicit trust, and it's just the beginning. The next stage is adaptive trust, which many organizations are already familiar with. Its features include multi-factor authentication (MFA) and context-based threat detection. For example, when you log into your company email account while traveling and you're asked to type in an additional code, that's adaptive trust making sure you're not an impostor trying to break in from an unfamiliar location. The final stage is what Ping defines as explicit trust, narrowing down the authentication factors to one specific individual. This can involve biometric identification, device-bound information, and other unique identifiers. Furthermore, explained Ping's Business Lead of PingOne Recognize Ali Nazem and Senior Sales Engineer Dalton Slattery in a Wednesday breakout session, regular access logins are only one of three "doors" by which an adversary can break into an organization. The other two are the hiring process, as we've seen with multiple incidents of North Korean spies using false identities to work for Western companies, and the account-recovery and technical-assistance route, exploited