Using Technology to Overcome the Password’s Contradiction

Abstract

The traditional approach to security has been the use of passwords. They provide the system with a barrier to access what was quite safe in the analogical world. The digital era provided the means to easily try thousands of passwords in a short period of time and now the password schema is no longer safe. Now it suffers of the password’s contradiction: the fact that it requires both simplicity and complexity to be usable and safe. Being so, new technologies are required that can preserve the easiness of use, but can provide stronger authentication processes. This chapter presents the latest advances in three technologies that can be used, unaided or together, to improve the safety of user/password schemas without significant changes in the protected information system architecture, despite the human factors that traditionally reduce the security of those systems. The presented technologies are Keystroke Dynamics, Graphical Authentication and Pointer Dynamic.