Trust at Scale: Lessons Learned from a Decade of Engineering for Identity
Frederic Rivain
BSides NYC 2025 (0x05) · Day 1 · Entrepreneur
In his BSides NYC talk, "Trust at Scale: Lessons Learned from a Decade of Engineering for Identity," Frederic Rivain, CTO of Dashlane, offered a candid and insightful retrospective on the challenges and triumphs of building and scaling a security-focused product over nearly ten years. Rivain emphasized that trust, particularly for a "secret product" like a password manager, is not merely a technical construct but a multifaceted outcome influenced by technology, company culture, and organizational leadership. The presentation delved into Dashlane's evolution from a consumer-focused password manager to an enterprise-grade credential security platform, serving millions of users and 25,000 businesses.
AI review
Competent war story from a credible operator who actually did the work. Rivain knows his product cold and the talk has genuine honesty about failures — the iOS data loss incident, the password changer dead end, the Super Bowl disaster — which is rarer than it should be. But this is a BSides slot, not a research submission, and it reads more like a well-written company retrospective than a talk that will change how anyone in the room builds or defends systems.