*Get ready to hear a lot more about the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard in the coming months. Anyone familiar with the internet is aware that logging into websites with a password is often a laborious and annoying task. Not only is there a constant risk of being hacked – which many celebrities claim has happened to them – but we’re all prone to forgetting our passwords from time to time, no matter how hard we try to remember (or how many scraps of paper we write them on).
Certainly, digital methods do exist to make our online lives easier. Software like KeePass and LastPass is meant to keep all those precious passwords secure, and there are even instances of large-scale security partnerships, as we’ve noticed with Norton and its device protection plan with known web hosting company 1&1 on the web security section of the site. These plans, although well-meaning, are still affected by one of the biggest security flaws ever created: humans. True, many hackers are much smarter than the average person, but examples of giving out passwords via email or the phone to strangers claiming to be from banks are not at all uncommon.
However, the problem being tackled right now is to eradicate passwords completely – a step towards a safer internet experience, we hope. New versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge (no mention on Safari just yet) are set to include a login system which relies heavily on biometrics. As is already implemented on many smartphones, fingerprints and retina scans will be used to gain access to the plethora of sites we have to log in to every day. One-time use authentication tokens sent to your smartphone can also be used to log in to a site, without a password or username ever being needed. It’s thought that these ideas should decrease phishing attempts and data hacks in terms of using the World Wide Web in general, as there won’t be any passwords to steal.
“WebAuthn will change the way that people access the Web,” said Jeff Jaffe in a statement, chief executive of the World Wide Web Consortium. “While there are many web security problems and we can’t fix them all, relying on passwords is one of the weakest links. With WebAuthn’s multi-factor solutions we are eliminating this weak link.”
WebAuthn has been in the works for many years and will still take a bit of time to be implemented, but it appears that, thankfully, the days of trying to remember dozens of different passwords is coming to an end.
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