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Why Apple, Google, Microsoft passwords should replace your own


The death of internet passwords has been declared many times, but this time, it may actually come sooner than you think. Its replacement? Password.

According to Kathleen Moriarty, chief technology officer at the Center for Internet Security, passwords are the way of the future in basic Internet security because they are intrinsically more secure and phishing resistant. As large companies include Apple, Google And Microsoft working with standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium — the two organizations that create password authentication standards — to provide support for cryptography on their platforms, list of organizations providing alternative key codes for passwords continues to grow.

“Passwords are an example of what security should be: seamless and invisible to the end user,” says Moriarty.

How does the password work

Using a password allows an individual to gain access to an account by approving logins on an external device without the need for a password.

When someone logs into an account with a confirmation code, a prompt, also known as a challenge, is sent to an additional device owned by the user, such as their phone, allowing them to approve. Browse logins by entering some kind of PIN or using biometrics like fingerprints or scanning their faces. The mathematical relationship between the public key on the system to which the user is logged in as well as the private key on the user’s personal device allows the system to verify that the only person logging into the account is the person with the private key.

Avoid human errors and hackers

From a security standpoint, passwords are much more secure than passwords for a number of reasons.

They provide single-user authentication for every application — each server-sent challenge is a new challenge, making the encryption different each time. Mutual authentication occurs when the server authenticates the user making them less vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Accessing the key is much more difficult, as hackers need to access both the public key on the app as well as the private key on the user’s device in order to gain access to their account.

ONE big problem with password is that people tend to use the same or very similar phrases for their passwords across multiple platforms to make them easier to remember, and they often contain personal information. Worse still, choosing a simple password (think “abc123” or “password”) makes the perfect target for hackers to easily gain access to individuals’ accounts. This means that hackers can gain access to multiple user-owned accounts simply by figuring out their password for a website or platform.

Passwords eliminate this problem because they eliminate the possibility of human error that can become a security issue. There is no password reuse, as each password is unique for each user as well as the application.

“You’ve been warned in the past, don’t use passwords between different apps,” Moriarty said. “Passwords by design prevent any reuse, so you won’t be exposed if your key for one app is exposed to another because they’re completely separate.”

There have been several other attempts to better secure passwords even without the use of passcodes, such as using password manager Track passwords and other sensitive information securely in a separate browser or application. But those apps aren’t completely immune to security breaches, as demonstrated in the August 2022 hack of LastPassone of the largest password managers in the world.

But despite that, users should take some steps to better secure their passwords. The volume of password attacks has skyrocketed to estimated 921 attacks per secondup 74% in a year, according to the latest Microsoft Digital Defense Report.

Anti-phishing authentication will soon become the norm

Most major operating services currently allow the use of passcodes. Apple’s latest update, iOS 16 for iPhone as well as macOS Ventura for Mac, now supports passcodes. Google started rolling out keycode support for Chrome on Android, Windows, and macOS in December 2022.

By the end of 2024, the federal government is expected to fully transition to phishing-proof forms of authentication.

“Major operating systems now have full support while in the past only partially supported it,” Moriarty said. “So this turnaround and push for password support is going pretty fast right now.”

Internet service and device risk

Since passwords are still a relatively new form of login to personal accounts, not all services support them, although they are becoming a more common feature.

The only potential disadvantage to using a password occurs if a user loses the secondary device they use to access their account. If this happens, the password must be reset, but you should also have a backup device ready to prevent this from happening.

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