The Persistence of Passwords and Evaluating Authentication Alternatives

Опубликовано 28 июля 2016, 0:52

An overwhelming number of authentication technologies have been proposed to replace passwords over the past 20 years. The published claims of superiority of each are refuted by the continued dominance of text passwords for user authentication on the web. What explains this disconnect between researchers and the real world? The answer is many-fold, and includes not only problem definition - but also evaluation criteria, which we assert the security research community lacks consensus on, and only a small subset of which are considered in most research papers. Our exploration considers numerous examples from a broad spectrum of authentication schemes, and suggests a framework and methodology for comparative evaluation.