Passwords are dead! 11 Aug 2008

Computer security experts say that even hard-to-guess passwords - i.e. obscure blends of letters, digits and punctuation - provide us with little to no security protection. These experts therefore recommend that we abandon passwords altogether and instead, move to a system whereby our PCs and the sites we want to access take part in a cryptographically encoded conversation in order to establish the two parties' authenticity. This system relies on the transferring of digital keys and takes us humans (and our insecure ways) out of the log in equation altogether.

While this sounds great in theory, it may be sometime before it comes in to practice. Only 20 percent of PCs have the necessarily software installed; while an even smaller percentage of servers/hosts currently support the new system. The OpenID initiative has also become a major source of distraction in security experts' efforts to garner public support for this new method of authentication.