The history of passwords traces back to military messaging. In a war, military leaders must communicate, but without the enemy seeing that communication. The same philosophy holds true with protecting computer information, and is a critical subdomain of keeping computers safe.
Most computers have “certificates” to authenticate with each other. Setting certificate deadlines prohibits someone salvaging your computer later and using an old certificate.
Factors
There are three ways to give evidence that someone is who they say they are.
- Knowledge – something they know (e.g., a password or other “secret”)
- Possession – something they have (e.g., a mobile phone or other object)
- Inherence – something they are (e.g., fingerprint or face)
They all have downsides:
- Someone can guess knowledge (especially with social engineering).
- Someone can duplicate what someone possesses, or at least enough to fool a computer.
- Nobody can take someone’s inherence very easily, but it can’t be updated easily if they ever do succeed at stealing it (i.e., there’s no easy way to rebuild fingerprints or reconstruct a face).
To that end, most authentication starts with knowledge (often through passwords) and possession.
Knowledge – Passwords
With a computer-enforced “password policy”, nobody can enter obvious passwords hackers can guess at.
While using an arcane combination of letters, numbers, and symbols (“Y3ll0wB@1ly”) is marginally helpful, it’s better to have long strings of human-understandable text (“There are 14 ways to eat a tennis ball!”):
- Most substitutionary characters are interchangeable for a “dictionary attack” (e.g., add every iteration of “a” to also include “@”).
- Strings of human-readable text are easier to remember, and take an exponentially longer time for a computer to guess.
However, this policy must also require renaming the “default” passwords. Very often, there are automatic passwords that the manufacturer sets, and those require zero guesswork and a few web searches for hackers to discover.
To store the information, it should be in ciphertext, where the password is inaccessible. If a computer ever cross-references the password with anything, it’s likely waiting to be compromised.
Possession – Checksum
The simplest version of verifying a downloaded file is to cross-reference its download with its checksum, which is usually released on the website as a small separate download.
Possession – Tokens
Another means of verifying is via an external hardware token. This could be a USB drive or smart card, and simply contains a hash that matches what the authentication software is looking for.
Possession – Devices
One of the simplest ways to confirm someone possesses something is to send them a temporary message, such as a 6-digit code. Then, if they actually have the object and want to validate, they can enter a temporary 6-digit number.
Inherence – Biometrics
The most common “biometric” measurements are the fingerprint and facial recognition.
Ideally, a computer can only handle biometric data if it does the following:
- Never store the information directly.
- Only on secondary information from that biometric (e.g., an encoded “hash” from a fingerprint).
- Delete that secondary information immediately after using it.
2FA
For additional security, a system may use more than one authentication. It’s typically a password and a phone code, but could be security questions and a specific computer, or a fingerprint and password.