In the physical world, the difference is obvious. If you sit an exam, you need to prove who you are—it can’t be your brother, sister, or friend. That’s identification. If you go home, you need your keys—the door doesn’t care who you are. That’s authentication. One person has one identity but may use hundreds of different keys.
Online, those two functions have been merged. People use their identity to create and manage their own access. It’s like letting every employee cut their own keys to the building, store them however they want, and reuse them elsewhere. By design, every identity or password—whether from employees, contractors, or third parties—becomes a potential breach point, making people the largest attack surface.
For decades, companies relied on alerts, training, and threat monitoring. But these measures only patched a system already 90% leaky as the entire cybersecurity stack depended on human behavior. A single compromised credential could still expose the whole network, not by accident or negligence, but by design.
That means cybersecurity efforts have largely targeted the wrong threat. To stop breaches, the first step is fixing the broken architecture, and separate identity from access.