Is the age of the password over?
Published: 23 Feb 2005 16:10 GMT
"The devil's in the details here," Gentile said. Tokens have a place, he said, but that place is not the same in each business. "What's appropriate for one type of business and usage pattern may be very different from another."
There is also the issue of convenience. While RSA's tokens are small enough to fit on a keychain, they are also easily lost. People might be amenable to carrying one token. Less appealling to people is the prospect of needing one device to verify themselves to a bank, then another for their stockbroker, and ending up with a bunch of tokens.
A solution would be for online service providers to agree on a single product or standard. For now, it's unclear whether companies will come to an agreement on this. RSA, for its part, said it will try and work not only with its devices, but also with similar devices from others.
End of the line?
Some analysts do see the password fading as the primary means of authentication, particularly for online banking.
In a December report, Gartner estimated that by the end of 2007, 60 percent to 75 percent of US banks will use something stronger than a password, but stop short of giving out hardware tokens. Roughly 7 percent more will go as far as to hand out something like the RSA token, the research firm predicted.
Overseas, the overwhelming majority of banks will require something more than a simple password, with anywhere between one-third and one-half of banks requiring a hardware token, Gartner analysts said.
The bad news in Gartner study is that by the time many of these new systems become common, the thieves will have also moved on. By the end of 2007, half of today's stronger methods of authentication will no longer be strong enough to foil phishing or other online attacks, the report's authors said.
While technology providers have focused on hardware devices as a secondary means of identity authentication, research has come up with less costly replacements for the password.
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