{"id":14832,"date":"2024-11-24T14:34:12","date_gmt":"2024-11-24T19:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/?p=14832"},"modified":"2024-12-02T04:26:51","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T09:26:51","slug":"passwords-help-may-be-in-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/2024\/11\/24\/passwords-help-may-be-in-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Today: Tired of Remembering All Those Passwords? Help May Be in Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Excerpt from BU Today | By: Rich Barlow | November 19, 2024 | Photo: iStock<\/p>\n

Passwords have protected\u2014and perplexed\u2014people since they were invented during the Kennedy administration for a multiuser computer at MIT. The leader of that long-ago project more recently called passwords \u201ckind of a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t take a PhD in computer science to know why. Hackers can heist passwords, compromising your accounts, or in some cases, those of millions of people. We\u2019re told to create many different passwords to limit that threat, but remembering them all is daunting. That\u2019s why the world\u2019s most common password (easy to remember\u2014and to hack) is \u201c123456.\u201d<\/p>\n

A story recently published in Vox asserts that \u201ca world without passwords is in sight\u201d thanks to passkeys: encrypted codes, stored on a device or password manager, that allow a user to log into websites and apps by using their fingerprint, a PIN, or facial recognition. They are impervious, passkey developers say, to phishers and cannot be stolen.<\/p>\n

\"BU<\/p>\n

The list of major websites that support passkeys ranges from Amazon to Best Buy to Google to Walmart, though many keep a password as a backup if users lose track of their passkey.<\/p>\n

BU Today asked Mayank Varia<\/a>, an associate professor in BU\u2019s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, whether passwords are bound for the way of the brontosaurus. \u201cSecurity, just like life, is all about trade-offs,\u201d he says. \u201cThe question is, what is the convenience-versus-security trade-off? And there\u2019s a whole spectrum of options there, and I think [a passkey] is a reasonable choice within those options.\u201d<\/p>\n

Varia researches cryptography and serves on the United Nations Privacy-Preserving Techniques Task Team, which promotes laws and policies regarding cryptography and protected data analysis.<\/p>\n

Read the Full Article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read about the work being done by CDS professor Mayank Varia on cybersecurity in this Q&A about his research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18839,"featured_media":14833,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,230,35,247,397,244,246],"tags":[52,53,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18839"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14832"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14912,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14832\/revisions\/14912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}