Password On Media #13

Below are some of the latest media articles about password problems and my comments on them.

- Forgotten Passwords Cost Companies $200,000 a Year

http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/forgotten-passwords-cost-companies-200000-a-year.html

“A recent survey of 2,000 people in the U.S. and the U.K. has found that companies lose over $420 in productivity per employee per year due to workers struggling with passwords -- for a 500-person company, that's a loss of more than $200,000 per year.”

My comment:  On top of the damages caused by forgotten passwords we could add the damages by broken and stolen passwords.

- Passage Replaces Your Passwords With Images

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/19/passage-replaces-your-passwords-with-images/

“From the users’ perspective, here is how it works when you end up on a site that uses Passage: you register with your email and then, instead of entering a password (twice), you hold up your image in front of your camera to register it”

My comment:  The title of the report first led me to wonder if another pictorial password is being reinvented, but it soon turned out to be possibly an alternative to biometric facial recognition.  Pattern matching of the images used in the video may well be much easier than that of faces because there are much more feature points.  A snag is that, although the objects to be used as images to be photographed may not be as publicly exposed as our faces, those image objects can be left behind or lost a bit more easily than our faces. 

- What the cybersecurity executive order means for authentication

http://secureidnews.com/news-item/what-the-cybersecurity-executive-order-means-for-authentication/

“The focus of the announcement was on the move to EMV and the more secure chip and PIN technology. “-

My comment:  "Chip & PIN" is no doubt better than "Chip Only" or "PIN Only", but obviously not as good as “Chip & Strongest Password”.

Using a strong password does help a lot even against the attack of cracking the stolen hashed passwords back to the original passwords. The problem is that few of us can firmly remember many such strong passwords.　 We cannot run as fast and far as horses however strongly urged we may be. We are not built like horses.  At the root of the password headache is the cognitive phenomena called “interference of memory”, by which we cannot firmly remember more than 5 text passwords on average. What worries us is not the password, but the textual password.

Multi-factor authentications are also referred to in the article.  Security could certainly be raised by putting a 2nd factor, a 3rd and so on.  But the piling up inconveniences thus caused could in turn drive users away and ruin the whole scheme altogether.

*************************************************************************************

About Me

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hitoshi-kokumai/3b/483/4b2

About Expanded Password System "Mnemonic Guard"

http://mneme.blog.eonet.jp/default/files/outline_of_mnemonic_security.pdf

*************************************************************************************