Is two-factor authentication the death of the password?
by Queena Kim
Remember the AP Twitter hack about a month ago? The stock market took a deep dive — for a little bit — in response to the fake "tweet" that the White House had been attacked?
Well, it hadn't been, as we know. And we also know that these kinds of security breaches are pretty commonplace. Today, Twitter announced it’s offering two-factor authentication. For users who opt-in, your password won't be enough to get you into your account.
And this has got people saying that we might be seeing the beginning of the end of the password. The problem with passwords is human error and having to remember so many of them, says Dug Song, the CEO of Duo Security. He says — despite repeated warnings — people use easy passwords over multiple sites. “And so the realization has been that there has to be something strong to protect those accounts,” Song said.
So tech companies are trying to get rid of the password. Facebook’s experimenting with asking you to ID photos of your friends, said Doug Tygar, a computer science [and information] professor at U.C. Berkeley.
“Other people have proposed using biometrics, which would depend on measuring cornea scan or a handprint or one of colleagues here has proposed using brainwaves!” Tygar said....