On Password Strength
When I was doing my research fellowship at Hopkins a few years ago, the big buzzword then was biometrics. Essentially using properties of the human body to generate unique identifiers that would allow us to build security protocols around them. A few years later and now we’re inundated with various applications of this technology in the form of attempts to replace the age-old login process of username and alphanumeric passwords.
Ask any IT person. Passwords are the bane of our existence. Strong passwords seem to operate on a principle of the more irritating they are, the ‘stronger’ they are perceived to be, when in fact, this may not entirely be the case, as demonstrated elegantly by this brilliant XKCD comic.
Will applied biometrics in the form of single-sign on solutions save us from the pain of the ‘minimum of 7 characters, one upper case, one lower case, one symbol, one number, rotated every 2 weeks’ insanity?
We here at Cd hope so.