ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK: AI ‘knowledge’ spells the end of the password
Future systems will recognise us by certain actions we perform in specific ways
Information technology has had the blame for many disasters laid at its door, but the area in which it fails most consistently is in the very lock on the door: the password. Poorly chosen key words, poorly protected user databases and the immensely powerful arsenal of the hacker have combined to make the password an absurdly vulnerable form of information protection. Clearly, the password as a form of defence must die. Phones with fingerprint and facial recognition spell the beginning of the end, as they represent the device responding to who the user is rather than who the user claims to be. However, the PIN code is still at the heart of phone security. Fingerprint recognition itself has proved dodgy, with numerous techniques developed to get around it. It's possible to remain relatively secure if one follows a set of procedures that, in combination, make it seemingly impossible to be breached. However, the fatal flaw in this approach is that it depends on human reliability, an oxy...
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