Passwords You Say?

Passwords. The bastion of authentication. Defenders of data. Bane of those shadowy figures wearing hoods and ski masks in darkened basements whilst attacking your servers. Passwords protect your secrets, but how effective are they really?

Plenty of articles have been written on the short-comings of passwords — mainly around complexity, reuse, expiry, and how these additional “controls” may not truly solve the problems inherent to passwords. I will touch on these, but in the spirit of education I felt a duty to provide context and to answer the inevitable question one hears when they enact some new policy or control in the security world: “Why?”

I will start by saying that, in my humble opinion, passwords are here to stay — in one form or another. “What about biometrics?” you may ask — to which I will reply with another question: “What happens when your fingerprint is stolen?”. You can easily change a password. You can’t (easily) change your fingerprints. What about the tokens used in two-factor authentication? Couldn’t we simply just use those instead? Yes we could, but they can be lost or stolen, and can be expensive relative to a password. Economically speaking, we would have to see executives, as a whole, start taking security a lot more seriously if that is to happen.

So, for now, let us say that passwords will be with us for the foreseeable future. Maybe I’m wrong and some new technology will supplant passwords as the de facto standard — but for now they are here and we have to deal with them.

Now, Let us take a look at the current “state of the art” of passwords.

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