Slashdot Mirror
Moving Beyond Passwords For Security
Naturalist writes with an excerpt from a New York Times story about the need for a more secure method for identification than the password-based system almost everyone currently uses. The article also discusses the weaknesses of the OpenID initiative to simplify the process.
"The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords -- and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties' authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see. ...OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else's Web site. Nevertheless, every few months another brand-name company announces that it has become the newest OpenID signatory."
The solution is public key cryptography. The problem with that solution is that it only works as "something you have", not "something you know", which is the authentication mode of passwords. You can't leave "what you know" at home, but will you always have your smart card with you? Another problem is that secure public key cryptography requires a complete terminal under the control of the user, not just a card. The private key can never leave the user's control and the user must always know what it is used for. That requires a display and keyboard. Not something people want to have on them whenever they need to authenticate.
That almost sounds like a....password...
Really, this is an article about using things instead of passwords....which function like passwords....and using passwords when those wouldn't be secure enough. What a stupid fucking article.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Passwords can still play a role, the problem has always been user stupidity and convenience vs security. We always love to save time and anything that requires less effort = good for us, but at the expense of being less secure. Moving security to invisible layers is just asking for abuse by authorities, as if they didn't have enough power already via MAC address + ip binding in being able to track down and identify users by merely tooling around with the equipment right at the ISP end.
My bank uses multiple authentication using personal questions which I would only know the answer to and if you get the question wrong just once, it flags the account. The big problem is the amount of retries, you can't guess or brute force passwords on accounts that will lock after the first few failed attempts.
In my opinion it's probably best if we moved to gesturing, I find an interesting site here -
http://www.dontclick.it/
It could serve as an interesting basis for security, i.e. gesturing and opening the correct doors in a maze.
Problem exists between keyboard and chair, and the article does not address that aspect nor give any good workaround.
OpenID is _PERFECTLY_ compatible with passwordless authentication. For example, my OpenID provider uses Kerberos authentication.
I too feel that passwords are too weak. Something like special hardware tokens are much better, but there's no infrastructure for their distribution.
But doesn't this restrict people to using secure sites only from their own machines? I have encountered situations where I was at friends' houses, relatives' houses or even a work computer where I want to do something somewhat security-sensitive like checking e-mail. Wouldn't this sort of security measure make that far more difficult?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I felt I had to respond to your article about passwords. It's been Slashdotted here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/10/186203
But I felt it was important enough to write directly, and concisely, because you seem to have missed a fundamental point of OpenID.
OpenID promotes "Single Sign-On": with it, logging on to one OpenID Web site with one password will grant entrance during that session to all Web sites that accept OpenID credentials.
OpenID supports single-sign-on. There is nothing about it which requires you to use the same identity everywhere -- or even the same provider.
But more importantly:
OpenID offers, at best, a little convenience, and ignores the security vulnerability inherent in the process of typing a password into someone else's Web site.
Nothing about OpenID requires a password.
I'll say that again: NOTHING about OpenID requires a password.
What OpenID does is, in proper implementations, it allows us to sign in with any provider we choose. I could choose my own server as a provider -- thus, it's not necessarily "someone else's web site". And I don't have to use passwords -- I can use a password and a "security question", I can use public-key cryptography, or I can hire a secretary to sit at the server in question and only authorize requests when she receives a phone call from me.
Even if we assume everyone continues to use the same password, with the same account, everywhere, it's still better than a conventional login. With the conventional login, every site I log into could steal my password and use it to login as me elsewhere. With OpenID, only my OpenID provider can do that.
One single-point-of-failure is better than N single-point-of-failure.
You can't use Microsoft-issued OpenID at Yahoo, nor Yahoo's at Microsoft.
If true, that seems about on par for a technology in its infancy. Remember email? Used to be, you could only send mail to other people with the same ISP. Now, I can send mail to anyone, on any ISP, so long as I have their address.
So that says more about Yahoo and Microsoft's understanding of the technology than it says about the technology itself.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can't prove you have the "something you have" as in reality anything can be copied and thus you might just have a copy. Most of the token "things" are really a case of "something (something you have) knows" which isn't much better than "something you know".
Right?
There seems to be a slight misconception in the NY Times article around OpenID being tied to passwords. OpenID does not specify the authentication mechanism for the user to their OpenID Provider which means that we've seen many companies (including Microsoft) experiment with alternative authentication mechanisms atop OpenID. The big benefit OpenID then provides them is that they're instantly able to start letting users use their new authentication mechanism at any site which accepts OpenID logins. More about this over at http://openid.net/2008/08/10/challenges-facing-openid/.