I'm Chandan. Security pays the bills. Curiosity runs everything else.

I'm Chandan Reddy Bokka. By day I work in digital identity and security, which really comes down to one stubborn question: how does a system know you are who you say you are, and how much should it trust you with next. I like that question. It was never going to be the only thing I wrote about.

My curiosity does not care about my job title. I read psychology because I want to understand why people, me very much included, decide the way they do. I follow economics and money because the incentives behind almost everything are usually sitting in plain sight. I keep coming back to mathematics because it is the cleanest kind of thinking I know. And I pay attention to health in a way I did not bother to in my twenties, since the small things you do early are the ones that compound.

Away from all of that, I am the person replaying the last over of a cricket match in my head, and watching Formula 1 for the strategy as much as the speed. I will lose a whole evening to a film that earns it, or a book that will not leave me alone. Now and then I will write about something from my own life, because a person is more than the thing they happen to be good at.

So this is not a security blog that occasionally wanders off. It is a place where I think out loud about whatever has my attention that week, and try to say it plainly enough that someone sharper can tell me where I went wrong. Some weeks that means identity and cryptography. Plenty of weeks it means none of that.

The day job is real work, and I am proud of it. I am a Senior Manager at Deloitte and Touche LLP, and I have spent more than twelve years building identity systems, including the largest passwordless rollout in the U.S. public sector and the identity modernization for a state regulator that watches over more than three trillion dollars in assets. A growing share of my time now goes to getting those systems ready for the day quantum computers break the cryptography we all quietly rely on.

If any of this sounds like your kind of conversation, whatever the subject, say hello.