password wars Paypal, Lenovo and others form FIDO Alliance against passwords and making internet securer

Despite their usefulness everyone and their mother hates passwords as they are  hard to remember, inconvenient to enter and worst of all can be leaked to a creepy group who could take advantage of your private data. We have seen different companies putting their ideas to replace passwords such as the one in which Google proposed to replace passwords with physical keys for internet services.

Now Paypal, Lenovo and others have founded the FIDO Alliance to bring technology standards to reduce user’s reliance on passwords and making accounts securer than they are right now. According to the new standards that the FIDO Alliance wants to make common, user himself will be the center of control and anyone with just the password won’t be able to access the account. This could be done by double authenticating with some physical object or mobile device along with a usual password. Services will be able decide whether they want two step verification or just one.

FIDO Alliance also thinks that it can use the proof of person’s identity by checking the security chip installed on most PCs today (usually used for data encryption), as this could be used by those services that use FIDO Alliance’s login methods. The authorization is also possible using the right fingerprint reader, which is present in many laptop models of today.

Even today many companies including Facebook and Google are using “two-factor authentication” which requires users to provide a physical secondary proof but not many companies are using it right now. However for using FIDO’Alliance’s method of authentication companies will have to update their servers as well as persuade users to install softwares required for the login in methods to work.

With efforts being made to replace passwords and making accounts more secure we hope to see passwords getting replaced by more advanced and securer alternatives before the end of this decade.

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