Basics of Digital Identity Revisited
Back To The Identity Basics: The Who, What, and How of It All
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/back-identity-basics-who-what-how-all-hanno-ekdahl
This Hanno Ekdhal’s newsletter drove me to revisit an earlier writing published 19 months ago — “What We Know for Certain about Authentication Factors” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-we-know-certain-authentication-factors-hitoshi-kokumai/
A: ‘Yes/No’ on feeding correct passwords/EPS and ‘Yes/No’ on presenting correct tokens are deterministic, whereas biometrics which measures unpredictably variable body features of living animals in changing environments is probabilistic.
B: It is practically impossible to compare the security of a strong or silly password with that of a poorly or wisely deployed physical token even though both passwords and tokens are deterministic,
C: Direct comparison of something deterministic and something probabilistic would absolutely bring us nowhere.
D: Deterministic authenticators can be used on its own, whereas a probabilistic authenticator would lose its availability when used on its own.
E: Deterministic authenticators can be used together in a security-enhancing ‘multi-layer’ deployment, whereas probabilistic authenticators can be used with another authenticator only in a security-lowering ‘multi-entrance’ deployment unless we can forget the availability.
F: Removal of the password brings a catastrophic loss of security. It also makes a grave threat to democracy.
G: PIN belongs to the family of password as a numbers-only password; displacing a password by a PIN is like displacing the ‘knife family’ by a ‘paper knife’.
H: Password/EPS, token and biometrics are ‘authenticators’, while two/multi-factor schemes, decentralized/distributed digital identity, single-sign-on schemes and password management tools are all ‘deployment of authenticators’; We would obtain nothing by comparing the former with the latter.
………………………………
It’s really sad that so many security professionals and big IT players still turn a blind eye to these basics of digital identity security.
Website — https://www.mnemonicidentitysolutions.com/
Digital identity blogs collected at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/collection-digital-identity-comments-hitoshi-kokumai-posted-kokumai/
