AKQA TECH.insight, a discussion series exploring the technologies that are shaping our future, returned to London to investigate Security and Future Interfaces.

The evening began with a session about the affects a major data breach can have on a company’s reputation, and how it is essential for businesses to interrogate their products for security vulnerabilities. This was followed by a presentation on how to create secure digital products, and tips were shared on what developers should keep in mind at each stage of development from concepting through to product release, future updates and on-going maintenance.

The conversation moved to the potential of invisible interfaces, the impact and challenges businesses face when using biometric technologies including face, voice and fingerprint recognition. Questions around security and reliability were answered, highlighting this area is quickly evolving to meet its potential flaws. However, as we are entering into new era of data capture, it was noted there will be inevitable legal and moral challenges that will need to be navigated in the near future.

The session concluded with a presentation of tools and techniques that developers should consider using when accelerating application development using 3rd party and open source libraries as they can introduce vulnerabilities into the codebase. It was mentioned in certain cases, vulnerabilities are published through release notes from the authors of those libraries, but there are no reliable mechanisms to ensure developers are notified when they are discovered or patched.

TECH.insight events take place across the world. Sign up to attend our future meetups here.