Identity without Passwords

Every day, employees at hotels, restaurants, and resorts across the country are doing exactly what they were hired to do: being warm, responsive, and eager to help. It's what makes hospitality work. It's also what makes hospitality one of the most targeted industries in cybersecurity. When your entire workforce is trained to say yes, teaching them to be suspicious is an uphill battle. The smarter solution might be to take the target off their backs entirely.

Jasson Casey is the co-founder and CEO of Beyond Identity, a company built around one idea: making identity-based attacks impossible. With over 20 years of experience designing large-scale security infrastructure for global enterprises and carriers, Jasson has spent his career thinking about what happens when stolen credentials open doors they never should have. Beyond Identity's answer isn't better passwords or more authentication hoops, it's eliminating the credential that can be stolen in the first place.

Josh Johansen is the Director of IT Systems and Technology at Brandt Hospitality Group, an owner, operator, and developer of hotels under brands including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG. Josh came up through hotel operations, not a computer science program, and that background shapes how he thinks about security practically, from the floor up. He knows his workforce isn't looking to become cybersecurity experts. His job is to build systems that protect them anyway.

We talk about why the hospitality industry is such a rich target for phishing attacks, and what happened when one of Josh's general managers nearly paid a fraudulent invoice because she couldn't log in without a password she no longer had. Jasson breaks down how device-bound passkeys work, why most consumer passkeys aren't nearly as secure as people think, and what separates a real security system from one that just looks like one. Josh shares the lessons learned from rolling out this technology across a multi-brand hotel portfolio including what he'd do differently and what it means for an industry still wrestling with shared logins, high turnover, and workers using four different brand systems before lunch.

Show Notes:

• [3:05] A cyber insurance mandate pushes Brandt Hospitality Group to find an MFA solution, and complaints about authentication fatigue make the obvious options the Brandt partners are already using feel like the wrong fit.
• [4:03] After months of evaluating vendors and completing a full proof of concept, the leading candidate drops smaller accounts without warning, sending Josh back to square one and into a same-day demo with Beyond Identity.
• [5:09] Beyond Identity moves fast, puts together a rapid proof of concept, and earns the business. Josh describes meeting Jasson in person for the first time at BeyondCon shortly after signing on.
• [5:45] Hospitality is uniquely vulnerable to phishing attacks, and the industry's culture of helpfulness connects directly to the behaviors bad actors are counting on.
• [6:49] A general manager calls convinced she needs her password to pay an overdue vendor invoice. When she can't get a login prompt, the situation is recognized immediately as a phishing attempt she nearly fell for.
• [7:33] Reflecting on that moment, someone sharp and experienced nearly became a victim, and removing the password from the equation entirely turns out to be the real breakthrough.
• [9:05] The conversation turns to the limitations of cyber awareness training, and why even well-intentioned employees with heavy workloads cannot be expected to function as a reliable last line of defense.
• [11:13] Jasson describes how Beyond Identity works, using the analogy of a monkey in a jail cell to explain how a signing key stored in a secure hardware enclave can authenticate a user without ever leaving the device.
• [12:06] The concept of stealable credentials expands beyond passwords to include API tokens, session cookies, SSH keys, and anything else that can be copied and lifted from a system.
• [17:33] The discussion shifts to agentic identity and AI-driven workflows, with customers on opposite ends of the spectrum — some where agents make up the majority of their workforce, others who paused rollouts after discovering how easily prompt injections could expose sensitive data.
• [19:17] The biggest mistake organizations make going into a passkey rollout is diving in without a clear understanding of how their identity environment is actually configured and what that means when things don't behave as expected.
• [20:35] A lesson from their own deployment — initially limiting passkeys to senior staff and leaving line-level employees on passwords — makes clear that partial coverage leaves meaningful gaps.
• [22:58] Most organizations under active phishing load will experience an incident during a mid-deployment window, and that moment often becomes the event that accelerates full adoption.
• [24:33] The shared workstation challenge in hospitality comes into focus, along with how the device-bound passkey differs from the consumer versions employees may already be familiar with through Google or Facebook.
• [29:14] Jasson draws a clear line between consumer passkeys optimized for conversion and enterprise passkeys built for security, explaining how sync fabric trades credential protection for convenience in ways that matter in a corporate environment.
• [31:07] One enrolled device can cryptographically authorize the enrollment of another, allowing organizations to scale without moving keys or introducing new vulnerabilities.
• [33:33] The passkey model changes accountability inside a hotel operation — device-bound credentials and role-based access make it significantly harder for well-meaning managers to share login access with staff informally.
• [36:55] As the conversation wraps, a simple test is offered for evaluating any passkey system: if the passkey can move, it is not a security product.

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Links and Resources:

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• Jasson Casey - LinkedIn
• Jasson Casey - National Security Institute
• Beyond Identity
• Joshua Johansen - LinkedIn
• Brandt Hospitality Group