Pages

Monday, June 11, 2012

Passwords Are Problematic

With the latest news that LinkedIn's security was compromised and customer passwords were obtained, we were again reminded to use different passwords for different sites, to make them a complicated assortment of letters, numbers, and symbols, change them often, oh and yes, remember them all.  And yet how many of us do this?  Worse, the ones we do use, we sometimes forget the password, log in name, or both.  And so despite the security breaches, most of us use one or two or at most three for most of our accounts.  Compromised at one site, obtained for all.

We need a better solution to passwords.  With new touch screens and front facing cameras, other choices may be around the corner.  From face or fingerprint recognition to voice, we need a different way to access our accounts and personal information in a way that cannot be used without us being present.  Are these new methods better; hopefully, so.  It is clear that as banks and financial institutions also find that their client passwords are also stolen, that  other means of verification are necessary.

Passwords don't work because we have a hard time remembering all the different passwords that we create, for work, home, email, bank, subscription services, etc.  The password system is compromised the moment we hand write the codes on our laptop, desk, notes app and other places.  It is worse when the institution that uses the password gets itself hacked and shares those passwords across the web.  So the race is on to find the next model of account verification online.  Hurry, we need it now.