Interview with Dr. Pramod Varma

Interview with Dr. Pramod Varma

Dear Listeners, in this episode we speak to Dr. Pramod Varma, who is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar. He is also the chief architect for various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA). He also played an integral role in architecting India’s digital health infrastructure (ABDM), vaccination & immunization infrastructure (Co-WIN and DIVOC), and Unified Health Interface (UHI). He is currently the CTO of EkStep Foundation and the genesis author of the open source beckn protocol.  Most importantly a true thought leader. We spoke to him about the following topics/questions: * Dr. Pramod's journey and how he came to work on Aadhaar and India Stack. The vision/mindset of the team that led to the largest biometric identity program in the world is also discussed * How Aadhaar has unlocked value for various sectors in India. * When designing Aadhaar, were other options/IDs/approaches available to your team? * Why should the industry attempt to solve some use cases around authentication? * What he thinks about relying less on OTP and moving toward secure and password-less solutions * We discuss the supreme court's ruling stating that the right to privacy is fundamental, but not absolute. As well as asking his thoughts on the new Data Protection law * What are the new projects that you have been working on - beck.org/diksha?

Interview with Co-Chair - FIDO India Working Group

Dear Listeners, in this episode we speak to Shankar Ramaswamy the co-chair of the FIDO India Working group and ex-founding team member of Singular Key, which is part of ping identity now. Shankar is a Security Product Strategist and Security Domain expert with 24+ years of experience in the industry. He has also co-authored a whitepaper FIDO Authentication in Digital Payment Security: In line with the Reserve Bank of India’s Master Directions [https://media.fidoalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FIDO-White-Paper-_-FIDO-Authentication-in-Digital-Payment.pdf] which we speak about in this episode Most importantly a true thought leader on the topic of Identity and Authentication. We spoke to him about the following topics/questions: * What is the importance of authentication in modern times and what role does it play in our lives as digital users? * What different kinds of fraud we are witnessing in the Indian market? * Why passwordless authentication has the potential to solve Account Takeover Frauds and others happening in the market? * Why are banks are exploring alternatives to SMS OTP and what does clause 64 of the payment directive mean for authentication? * What work is the FIDO alliance and working groups doing in India? * What do you think about the study by banking frontiers where FIDO security keys were found to be more secure than SMS-OTP? * How does the future look like?