From Passwords to Cotter: How it all Began?
(Photo : From Passwords to Cotter: How it all Began?)

Today, a significant part of our daily lives is online. With an average person having nearly 100 different online accounts from work, school, social media, and games, the biggest issues are passwords that we cannot remember or passwords that are too easy to be cracked. The standard is that passwords must be unique, complex, and long to be effective; this standard has made it very hard for the average person to recall his/her password.

Remarkably, a co-founding team of five people with a great vision identified the problems that come with data leaks due to weak passwords and redefined authentication in a novel way with Cotter, a passwordless authentication service. You can add a single-tap login to your website and mobile applications in under 15 minutes to your website or mobile application. Users can then log in via email, phone, or a prompt on their devices for a quick and simple authentication process.

Cotter to The Rescue: Authentication is being redefined

In recent generation websites and mobile applications, passwords are no longer used. To authenticate users, companies send One-time Passwords (OTPs) via SMS or email. The reason for this is the increasing dependency on mobile devices to access the internet by people of all ages across the globe. Therefore, both older and newer generations of web and mobile applications are catering towards the increasingly mobile world.

The current way of authentication is either by entering a password or a one-time password has been widely exploited by scammers and hackers globally. Passwords are an issue because people reuse them even after their accounts have been compromised while one-time passwords are remotely transferable.

Recently, it is common to encounter phishing emails, phone calls, or text messages of scammers pretending to be a company representative and ask for your one-time password. Moreover, scammers have also figured out that they can ask your carrier for a copy of your SIM card once they have your personal information which led to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's Twitter account being hacked. These scam methods have given hackers the ability to gain access to users' accounts remotely.

It doesn't end in security vulnerabilities; one-time passwords have also cost businesses billions of dollars globally to send SMS one-time passwords as they have to pay for the SMS every time a user signs up, logs in, transacts, and more. The founders put it this way, "We created Cotter because we needed ten times the protection and one-tenth the cost of infrastructure. Using the public key infrastructure, we introduced the most up-to-date, stable, and industry-standard authentication, tying users' accounts to their devices."

The Founders of Cotter and their Enthralling Backstories

Kevin Nicholas Chandra

Co-Founder and CEO at Cotter, Kevin is originally from Indonesia but graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. Apart from this, he has also previously worked as a software engineer at Alpaca Markets (Y Combinator W19). He is currently leading Cotter's technology development, product development, sales, and marketing.

Michelle Marcelline

Michelle is a co-founder at Cotter. She graduated with a degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently working in Operations at an insurance firm, Huckleberry. She is currently leading the Cotter's product development, operations, and data analysis.

Albert Putra Purnama

Co-Founder at Cotter, Albert is an experienced software engineer who has previously worked for another Y Combinator company, Alpaca Markets (Y Combinator W19) where he helped them build a US Stock Exchange trading API. He currently leads the technology development focusing on back-end development at Cotter.

Anthony Christian

Co-Founder at Cotter, Anthony graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has also previously worked with Albert and Kevin at Alpaca Markets. He currently leads the development of Cotter's infrastructure that scales to delivering millions of authentication requests every month.

Putri Karunia

Co-Founder and CTO at Cotter, Putri graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is a talented software engineer who has previously worked at Yelp as a software engineer. She currently heads Cotter's technology development in both front-end and back-end development.

The two major benefits that Cotter has to offer

Cotter has two major advantages which are eliminating the possibility of scammers being able to remotely gain access to users' accounts and saving businesses billions of dollars by authenticating their users using the public-private key pair over the internet rather than sending an SMS.

The Following Substantial Movement in authentication is "Passwordless Authentication"

With new government regulations and commitment from industry leaders like Apple and Google, passwords and one-time passwords will soon be gone from our lives. However, this takes a significant amount of effort from other players to change their authentication methods as well.

Luckily, Cotter is making it easier for businesses of all sizes to integrate passwordless authentication into their app with 10 lines of code. The company's SDK and API are making it easier than ever to instantly integrate multiple authentication methods such as signing in with email/phone number, public-private key pair, and WebAuthn in less than 15 minutes.

The reason why Cotter's passwordless authentication solution is better than passwords or one-time passwords is that it is built on top of the public-key infrastructure. This enables Cotter to tie the user's account to his/her device by storing a private key on the secure enclave of the user's device. When a user requests authentication (sign up, log in, transaction, etc.), Cotter will send a challenge that will be signed by the user's private key. It will later be verified by the public key and the user is granted access to his/her account. All this happens behind the scenes whereas the user simply just logs in without the need of entering his/her password.

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