Passwordless Solutions: Secure Your Digital Identity

In this era of technology, dealing with digital identities is becoming more complex and tedious. An average person utilizes about 100 combinations of usernames and passwords. However, when several security teams advise business users to create complex, individual, and strong passwords, most of them fail to do so. As a result, the passwords are either repeatedly used or weak. The huge number of cyber-attacks including compromised credentials can straightly result in cyber threats, data leaks, and intellectual property theft. 

Every company must deal with a lot of credentials and accounts for employees, users, and electronic devices. Occasionally, these siloed digital identities can cover thousands of locations- or even millions. All this confusion is encouraging to adopt passwordless authentication solutions. 

Laya Tech enables completely password-free customer journeys out of the box and frees employees from the difficulty of remembering as well as managing passwords.

What is Passwordless Authentication?

‘Passwordless’, doesn’t mean that there is no existence of passwords; it means that application accounts and end-users are not exposed to the credentials required to access important systems. The purpose of the Passwordless authentication solution is to improvise security and make it more simple and convenient to access resources for users. 

With the help of passwordless solutions, users don’t require to remember or enter passwords to log in to different applications. Rather, access is received as per the user permissions or something that can’t be acquired by anyone other than the right user, like a biometric identification. If any password is never exposed to the end-user, then there is no possibility of theft and since the endpoints are some of the major critical systems to secure completely, the passwordless solution is a sound technique. 

Advantages of Passwordless Authentication

• Better user experience: Be it social media sign-in, fingerprint scanning, PIN authentication, or verification of email, no need to remember any credential details. Passwordless authentication solutions just take certain basic steps and perform on both websites as well as mobile applications. 
• Improved cost-effectiveness: Passwords need continuous maintenance. As per studies, the standard cost of one password reset for an organization is nearly $80. For big enterprises, this cost reaches USD 1 million every year.No need to say, eradicating passwords will not only save productivity as well as time but also load of expenses.
• Stronger security: Passwords managed by users are vulnerable to threats like credential stuffing, phishing, corporate account takeover (CATO), brute force attacks, and many more.That’s why, when there is no password to steal, those attacks will reduce automatically.
• Greater convenience: Since without using any password, users can authenticate, it becomes easy to sign in and access information.
• IT Gains Control and its Visibility: Reusing, phishing, and sharing passwords are just some of the problems related to password-based authentication. Hence, when there is no requirement for passwords, IT can retrieve its reason of having total visibility over identity and access management.

What Does Passwordless Authentication Solutions Protect

Following are some attacks that different businesses should avoid by applying passwordless authentication solutions into their systems. 

1. Password spraying: It is a strategy of cyber-threat that tries to log in to different accounts with normally utilized password credentials.
2. Strong Force Attack: Hackers use the hit and trial technique to guess the login encryption or credentials keys. Until the account is hacked, they try all the probable combinations.
3. Spear phishing: It can be defined as an email spoofing attack that scams different people and organizations to provide sensitive credentials for military, financial, or trade gains.
4. Social Engineering: Hackers utilize psychological manipulation and scam users to provide sensitive information or getting access to important resources.
5. Shoulder Surfing: It is one kind of data hacking where the burglar steals login credentials at a glance over the target’s shoulder.

How Is Passwordless Authentication Solution Safe as Compared to Other Login Techniques

A normal problem with using passwords for authentication purposes is based on the reality that through that customers want to log in to their accounts quickly. The longer time it takes to sign-up, mostly they will tend to bounce. Other reasons for password bounce are: 

Complexity of Password is weak: Maybe passwords meet the complexity standards but maybe still they are weak due to password dictionaries.

• Passwords obey patterns: since maximum passwords follow a specific pattern, it becomes easier to perform data theft for hackers. 
• Passwords aren’t exclusive: People reutilize passwords and newly exposed dictionaries have previously leaked passwords.
• Because of weak password practices, people are putting their accounts at heavy risk. This is one of the biggest reasons why consumers and enterprises prefer passwordless authentication solutions.  

Types of Passwordless Authentication

In a general application, passwordless solutions can be applied through several techniques. Here is a list of some general ones. 

Email-Based Passwordless Solution

This is one of the most general login systems. The user is asked to enter their email addresses. A magic link or unique code is generated and sent to the linked Email ID. When the customer clicks on that link, the server gets ready to verify if the entered code is right or wrong within a particular period. If the authentication process is approved, then the customer can let in.  

Social Login Authentication

The social login process is an authentication strategy utilizing a social network provider like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. the user clicks the application and chooses a particular social network provider. Then a log-in request is sent to the provider and when the provider approves it, then the user is allowed to access the particular application. There are no requirements for passwords at all.  

Passwordless Login Through SMS

It is a very easy method to onboard a user. Login based on SMS eradicates the requirement to generate extra credentials, thereby securing the authentication process. Here the involved steps are very simple: First a user should enter a valid phone number; after that, the service provider sends a code to that number which the user has entered.

Biometrics-Based or Passwordless Authentication 

Biometric authentication solution focuses on developing technologies such as the face, fingerprint, or iris scans. This technology can be done on smartphones where users provide their thumb impression on the scanners of the phone to authorize their identities and get access to their desired accounts.  

Conclusion

The whole world is going through this password issue. Remembering passwords is not only difficult but also log in by passwords is very risky. To secure passwords, the authentication industry has formulated many strategies, but only some of the strategies can eliminate insecure passwords. The icing on the cake is the passwordless authentication solutions improve the customer experience. That is great for the reputation of your brand and your development. We are working to create cyberspace more simpler and resilient by eliminating passwords. 

If your organization is not on board with the passwordless solution yet, the time has come to act now.