Kai Kenan
VP of Identity & Reputation
Appdome
Kai Kenan leads identity and reputation at Appdome, where his team builds the systems that decide whether a device carries a history, and whether it should be trusted to act. He has spent eight years there, moving up through engineering leadership into research, each step moving further up the stack: from hardening apps against tampering, to researching how attackers actually break them, to the question of which devices should be allowed to act at all. His hands-on background is low-level Android and iOS internals and mobile game anti-cheat.
Your Phone Has a Record. Your App Never Asked: The Next Generation of Mobile Trust
Session
Every app has a handful of actions it cannot undo. Behind each of those requests is a phone, and the app trusts what the phone tells it. The app never sees the person. It sees a reading from the phone in that person's hand, and takes it as proof. That phone belongs to the person making the request. No one has ever inspected it.
Enormous effort goes into judging the reading. Far less goes into judging the phone that produced it. That gap is authority: has this phone earned the right to act for a user, given what it is doing now and what it has done before?
This session treats authority as a gate in front of consequential actions, wherever they sit and whatever the app is checking. It covers why the check itself is the wrong place to look, which flows are worth gating, what the gate should do when a device is unknown rather than bad, and what reputation-gated flows look like in practice.