Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  The Password Is Fayleyure (01 Feb 2005) Today’s password authentication schemes are little more than security placebos. They perversely inspire abuse, misuse, and criminal mischief by deliberately making users the weakest link in the security chain. Greater teleprocessing power has made stealing or cracking password sequences ever faster, better, and cheaper. Security guru Mark Seiden observes that many hack attacks have nothing to do with how “strong” a target password is, because these attacks rely on brute-force discovery of alphanumeric sequences. “The bad guys are really attacking your keyboard,” he says. That security system administrators make users jump repeatedly through digital hoops to defend the “integrity” of our four- to 12-character sequences falls somewhere between insult and joke. Article URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/issue/review_password.asp Read 224 more articles from Technology Review Magazine sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Validating a Custom DTD     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy