Passwords Not Going Away Any Time Soon

  • 21 October 2014
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By Paul Rubens  |  Posted October 20, 2014
 
While biometric authentication and other password alternatives abound, traditional passwords remain the go-to method of authentication due to low cost.
 
 
While passwords have got a lot of bad press recently thanks to somemassive security breaches, the truth is that as an authentication system they can provide a very high level of security. Perhaps more important, a password is cheap to issue compared to two factor authentication systems that rely on hardware tokens or biometric systems that use fingerprint or voice recognition.
"The entropy of a complex password is uncrackable," points out Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer and security researcher at SRLabs,a German hacking think tank. Nohl specializes in testing security assumptions in proprietary systems and, typically, breaking them.
The problem with a complex password - one that is made up of perhaps 15 or more upper and lower case characters, digits and special characters - is that it is almost impossible for users to remember. Thus many people use simple passwords like "monkey" that offer almost no security at all.
 
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