Age of passwords
These days the password, is rather valuable bit of information. One password can open the doors to a treasure trove of information. Protecting that password is important, old advice used be regularly changing it and mix of letters with numbers. Users can get rather lazy, so many passwords end up seeing similar or same ones in use. Nordpass lists the most common ones every year. Some great examples within that list.
Everything these days requires a password, keeping track of them all can be huge pain in the arse. Advice has changed from regularly changing them to keeping them hard to guess. Humans are awful at making random passwords, computers are rather good at guessing them. Often the end user is the weak link these days. Cyber-attacks often focus on users first and breaking the system afterwards. Different ways of fixing this problem, random computer generated or passphrases. Passphrases are random selection of words together that is different to crack. Most important point is far easier to remember compared to random string of letters.
Best practises with password these days.
- Use different ones
- Random generated ones
World has tried to move on from the old password, PIN systems, pairing it with secondary authentication system and using biometrics. Two-factor authentication (2FA) has started to become far more common. Killing off the idea of security questions, some services still use it. Even with all of that passwords still remain important. Articles come out yearly claiming passwords could soon be a thing of the past. Yet they remain most common way so secure accounts to this day.
Nobody can agree on what should replace it or the standard. Until now with tech companies announce support for passkeys. Big three Apple, Google and Microsoft all planning to support it. Unsure when they plan on doing a mass roll out. New method is similar to old method that has existed for years now. Creating a random key, similar to SMS authentication, could be misunderstanding how it works.
Password managers aim to solve that problem, keeping everything safe and easy to access. Some have been breached recent example being Lastpass. No password manager can be 100% secure, putting all your eggs into one basket is never wise.
Cloud based offer easy access anywhere anytime, offline ones keep everything in front of you. Biggest cloud-based ones include dashlane, 1Password, Lastpass and Google. Trusting these providers to keep this data safe. So many different offerings here impossible to list them all. Each having pros and cons, suitable for different needs. Keepass is one of the oldest most trusted offline ones. KeePass is an open-source password manager, first release was 19 years ago. Locally storing the database over using cloud storage. Supports plugins that allow you to change various features. Its user interface is well not very user friendly and shows it age. Tech savvy users won’t find it a problem but everybody else good luck.
It is possible that passkeys kill off passwords and managers. End of the day still trusting companies or programs to keep your data secure. I’m tempted to test passkeys and how it works but so far nobody is supporting it. Age of passwords is not over just yet.