Passwords are long and complicated and hard to remember. And
that's only if they'regood passwords. No matter how you slice it,
passwords are annoying and on top of that, they're not even all that secure.
Google knows that all too well, and it's pushing for the next big thing. A ring maybe. Like for your
finger.
Google's
been getting behind two-step verification for a while, and although that's more
secure than a standard password, it's also more annoying. Hardly a perfect
solution. In a paper to be published later this month inIEEE Security
& Privacy Magazine, Google's President of Security
Eric Grosse and Engineer Mayank Upadhyay are pitching alternatives like
cryptographic card for your USB, or some kind of (presumably NFC) ring.
Google's got some software in the
making that'd allow this kind of stuff to log you into a browser without
involving any sort of software in the middle, just you and your browser. But
even in the best possible future, it won't kill passwords completely. So long
as your little key can be separated from you, you'll have to have a PIN or
something, and the more conveniently short the PIN, the more important it is
you don't loose that key. Still, it beats straight passwords and two-step
verification annoyances. And the sooner the password can finally be laid to
rest, the better.
