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DARPA Wants To Kill the Password
jfruh writes Many security experts agree that our current authentication system, in which end users are forced to remember (or, more often, write down) a dizzying array of passwords is broken. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department research arm that developed the Internet, is trying to work past the problem by eliminating passwords altogether, replacing them with biometric and other cues, using off-the-shelf technology available today.
You can change a password, you can't change your retina print. What do you do when your account is compromised? Get new eyes?
Ultimately whatever password replacement you come up with gets turned into TCPIP packets over the intertubes. Whether you are measuring my height, fingerprint, penis size or whatever metric you come up with, it gets turned into 0's and 1's that I can grab and duplicate. It is still information on a remote server than can be hacked and used by third parties.
And worse... once hacked, I can't do much to change my biometrics... so I'm totally screwed once the host server is hacked and a million biometric accounts are compromised.
...when the NSA wants to tap into various accounts, they can track exactly who they belong to and who accesses them because it will be linked to your personally identifiable biometrics
I can change my password anytime if I think somebody copied it. I cannot change my fingerprint or retina. There is no way I'm giving random webshops or google my biometric data.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
I'm ready to switch passwords for anything else as long as:
1 - It can't be extracted from me by an easier method than torture or blackmail.
2 - It stops working forever if I'm dead.
Otherwise, some blood will have to wash away the naivete. Again.
Pam: Oh, OK, then good luck with all the biometric scanners. Unless you wanna cut off my fingers and scoop out my retinas.
Kidnappers look at each other.
Pam: Oh, don't be dicks!
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Every single site has a different way of giving you a way to change your password. This makes it impossible to write programs to write programs to change your password....like a password manager for instance. Imagine if you could just type in your new password into your password manager program, and it changes all the passwords it manages with one click. They could all be randomly generated and different for every site. Hints, recovery, email addresses, could all be updated with one click. With a history as to the previous versions in case something went south.
Instead of struggling with writing all the captcha's, and strength meters, and interfaces, and all the CRAP that the every site on the planet does differently. Just standardize the interface and maintenance of passwords. And then standardize the strength of the generator programs. And voila, permanent security that is controlled where it should be: in your hands.
"Yes, we've all seen dozens of those science fiction stories where they steal people's eyes, or cut off their fingers, or take swabs of their DNA."
cute, but not what the poster is talking about.
Your info, weather its a password, or the bio-metric info will get turned into a string and stored in a database.
Once that database in compromised, your bio-metric info on EVERY system you log into needs to be change to a different bio metric. They don't actually need to physical eye.
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