The Itanium is an architecture that will be around for the next 20 years
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Password protection software is six months away
BOFFINS AT RUTGERS, the State University of New Jersey, say that they are six months away from writing code that will protect passwords from being discovered.
While passwords are still a good method of protecting access to a computer or website the system has a lot of weaknesses. The first is that people use passwords that are too easy to guess.
A 1990 study found that people were able to guess someone else's email password 17 per cent of the time. Spouses guessed right 33 percent of the time.
Another problem is that people tend to forget their passwords and have to revert to answering a 'secret question', which is also often easy to guess.
Rutgers computer scientist Danfeng Yao said that security questions are not very secure and he is working out a better system. Yao is leading a team of scientists developing an "activity-based" approach to security questions.
In other words a computer could ask you something that is connected to the data it holds such as "When was the last time you sent an email?" Amazon could ask you about the last book you bought and a bank could ask you about the last deposit that you made.
The advantage is that answers to these questions - unlike birthdays, addresses, school names and so on - aren't found on online profiles, blogs or public records. Instead, Yao's dynamic questions have answers that change all the time.
She said that memory has not been an issue when activity-based questions were tried on her students.
This surprises us, as when we were students we could not even remember our own name first thing on Monday morning and probably didn't recover from our weekend hangover until the following Friday. µ
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What we really need is a device that reads brainwave patterns - unique to everyone - except to apple fanboys of course - they are all clones :D
This is a stick-up give me your dongle !!
Now where did I put my dongle?
Way to lock people out of their own PCs for good.
If you ask the question and expect input down to the second, well I defy anyone to get the answer right.
If you ask the question and propose three answers, well you give a hacker one out of three to chance his way in.
And what happens if the user gets it wrong ? Another question ? How many before lockdown ? How do you get out of lockdown, with a password ?
Good Lord, this is useless.
Teach people to be more responsible, that's the only solution.
Of course, it's a lot more difficult, and there's probably not a lot of grant money in that line of work.
A universal encrypted personal USB dongle could be produced for about $2.
No dongle, no logon.
Like everything simple and effective it might just happen in my life time.
This is a dumb as it gets and memory does play a big role in this. My own bank uses this method for phone support authentication (dob, mom's maiden and last transaction on primary account) and I always have to first login to my ebanking to see when exactly I use my debit card last time, like I keep a track of that crap (maybe they expect me to write it on my hand, but no that would be a security breach).
Secondly, whats the story with 6 (SIX) months away? I could code this in under six hours and give yuo a wsdl to attach to any datasource you like and we are ready to rock it. What does she need six months for? Is she burning some grant money so she stretches it?
Did computers even exist back then?
A 1990 study...
1990...
Makes Wikipedia seem like a good source.