Authentication keeps breaking where it matters most: On regulated front lines such as healthcare, government, aerospace and travel. The core issue is not a lack of innovation. Instead, it is a brittle and fragmented ecosystem of cards, readers, middleware and software that rarely work together under real-world pressure. Even today’s “passwordless” solutions can be undermined by poor implementation, downgrades and fallback paths that attackers are quick to exploit. This article examines where these failures occur, why they persist and offers a practical blueprint for CISOs to guide their organizations and vendors toward resilient, phishing-resistant and field-ready authentication. The problem...