Maybe soon just a rare sight: the classic login with username and password.
Complicated passwords are very difficult to crack, but also difficult to remember. There are tools like that Password manager Keepass, but many people still use rather easy passwords, and often even several times. This is one of the reasons why Apple, Google and Microsoft have all announced that they will abolish passwords as far as possible.
According to one Report by ITIGIC passwords consisting of less than five characters can even be cracked immediately. For passwords with eight characters, numbers and upper and lower case, they only need about an hour.
It only becomes safer with even more characters and other combinations of punctuation marks and numbers. However, for the sake of simplicity, many use rather short and uncomplicated passwords. You can see the whole overview of Hive Systems here:
Above all, short and uncomplicated passwords can be cracked quickly. Source: Hive Systems
How the three tech giants want to make our online life safer comes from one thing, among other things Blog article by Google out. Accordingly, at this year’s World Password Day, they have passed an important milestone on the way to a passwordless future.
This is how the passwordless future could work
In the future, you should be able to use your smartphone to log into online accounts, as is often the case with two-factor authentication.
Of course, the corresponding device must first be connected to the desired account. If you now want to log into a service, you will be asked to unlock your smartphone with your fingerprint, face recognition or device pin. You are already logged in.
The technology comes from the so-called FIDO-Allianz. FIDO stands for Fast IDentitiy Online
. This alliance consists of the largest technology companies worldwide and works to make online authentication faster and more secure. An important step in this direction is the abolition of passwords.
Your phone saves a FIDO authorization and becomes a key
with which you can log into all accounts that support the FIDO standard. This should become reality for Google and Android and the Chrome browser before the end of this year, and Apple and Microsoft are also working on implementing FIDO in their products such as Safari and Edge.
The authorization is cryptographically encrypted. This ensures that it is actually the correct key. In principle, your smartphone then works in a similar way to a hardware wallet for Bitcoin, which is indispensable for moving the cryptocurrency out of such a wallet.
With the cell phone access is not gone
Google also wants to store the FIDO authorization for you in the cloud so that you don’t lose it if you get a new phone or you lose the current one. However, this in turn poses the risk that hackers will gain access to your authorization if the cloud is hacked.
FIDO is not a 100% secure solution either, but it can probably never exist in everyday online life. By the way, games aren’t always completely safe either: just a few months ago, a hacker gained control of someone else’s PC through Dark Souls 3.
What do you think of the technology? Would you like to get rid of passwords as soon as possible or do you think they are a good and safe solution? Your opinion is in demand.
