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No one likes passwords as a standalone tool to authenticate users. Since 2012, many groups have moved to "kill the password," using that phrase specifically. Yet we'll end the year of 2019 as password-dependent as always.
The big picture: The adage goes that there are three ways to authenticate users: asking them for a thing they know (like a password), a thing they have (like a house key) or a thing they are (like a fingerprint scan).
- "A thing you know" is the only one of these a hacker can guess.
Everyone wants to kill the password. Google wants to kill the password. Microsoft wants to kill the password. The National Cyber Security Alliance wants to kill the password. Yahoo wanted to kill the password in 2015. Cellphone companies tried to kill it in 2014.
"Passwords won’t even be mostly dead anytime soon, because the fatality won’t spread to legacy applications that are too expensive to retrofit," said Wendy Nather, head advisory chief information security officer of Duo Security, a Cisco-owned company that specializes in bolstering login security.
The intrigue: There are other options than passwords for consumer-friendly security.
- A widely supported passwordless encryption protocol called WebAuthn is the most recent attempt to codify a global standard.
- Microsoft, and others, offer apps that use cellphones to authenticate.
- Google and Facebook allow users to login once on their services and log into other sites based on their go-ahead.
But, but, but: Users have a tendency to assume that authentication systems that are easier to use are less secure — that, somehow, the amount of effort it takes the user to do something is indicative of how difficult it would be for a hacker to break in.
- The Facebook breach shows some of the dangers of using a website with multiple moving parts as a centralized clearinghouse of user authentication.
- And, in general, for the security savvy consumer, it's always safer to use multifactor authentication — say, a thing you have plus a password or a biometric plus a password.
Editor's note: Wendy Nather is the sister of David Nather, managing editor at Axios.