The Guardian has assembled an expert panel to debate the looming demise of the password at the hands of biometrics technology. And while the panel doesn’t reach complete consensus, there seems to be general agreement that biometric technology is the way forward, and that the role of passwords in authentication will increasingly be relegated.
For her part, panel expert Angela Sasse, of University College London and UK Research Institute in Science of Cyber Security, pointed to the fingerprint-scanning TouchID system on Apple mobile devices as a game changer, saying it “marks a point of no return in the second coming of biometrics.” Indeed, the system has widely popularized fingerprint biometrics in the smartphone market, and thus has introduced mainstream consumers to the technology. Meanwhile, Ramesh Kesanupalli, founder of Nok Nok Labs and a VP on the FIDO Alliance, agreed that biometrics has reached the point where its ready quality and costs allow it get in the hands of consumers, and asserted that FIDO-ready products and services are coming to the market in droves. He predicted that while passwords won’t disappear anytime soon, they will remain “as a recovery process.”
The other panelists were more eager to sound a note of caution about the preponderance of biometric authentication. Dr. Steven Murdoch of University College London and the Vasco Innovation Centre in Cambridge warned that biometric technologies “show promise, but only as part of an authentication solution which optimises security, privacy and convenience.” Starbug, a hacker with Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Berlin, conceded that “the triumph of biometrics cannot be stopped,” but asserted that “biometric systems are not that much more secure than long passwords”. Both panelists agreed that spoofing poses a serious threat, since many biometrics – such as fingerprints and faces – cannot be changed if copied by fraudsters.
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April 17, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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