CYBERSECURITY TIP OF THE DAY 1

Authentication factors

An authentication factor is a category of credential used for identity verification. For MFA, each additional factor is intended to increase the assurance that an entity involved in some kind of communication or requesting access to some system is who, or what, they are declared to be. The three most common categories are often described as something you know (the knowledge factor), something you have (the possession factor) and something you are (the inherence factor).

Multifactor authentication technologies:

Security tokens: Small hardware devices that the owner carries to authorize access to a network service. The device may be in the form of a smart card or may be embedded in an easily-carried object such as a key fob or USB drive. Hardware tokens provide the possession factor for multifactor authentication. Software-based tokens are becoming more common than hardware devices.

Soft tokens: Software-based security token applications that generate a single-use login PIN. Soft tokens are often used for multifactor mobile authentication, in which the device itself – such as a smartphone – provides the possession factor.

Mobile authentication: Variations include: SMS messages and phone calls sent to a user as an out-of-band method, smartphone OTP apps, SIM cards and smartcards with stored authentication data.

Biometric authentication methods such as retina scansiris scans fingerprint scansfinger vein scansfacial recognitionvoice recognition, hand geometry and even earlobe geometry.

GPS smartphones can also provide location as an authentication factor with this on board hardware.

Employee ID and customer cards, including magnetic strip and smartcards.

The past, present and future of multifactor authentication

In the United States, interest in multifactor authentication has been driven by regulations such as the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) directive calling for multifactor authentication for Internet banking transactions.

One of the largest problems with traditional user ID and password login is the need to maintain a password database. Whether encrypted or not, if the database is captured it provides an attacker with a source to verify his guesses at speeds limited only by his hardware resources. Given enough time, a captured password database will fall.

As processing speeds of CPUs  have increased, brute force attacks have become a real threat. Further developments like GPGPU password cracking and rainbow tables have provided similar advantages for attackers. GPGPU cracking, for example, can produce more than 500,000,000 passwords per second, even on lower end gaming hardware. Depending on the particular software, rainbow tables can be used to crack 14-character alphanumeric passwords in about 160 seconds. Now purpose-built FPGA cards, like those used by security agencies, offer ten times that performance at a minuscule fraction of GPU power draw. A password database alone doesn’t stand a chance against such methods when it is a real target of interest.

In the past, MFA systems typically relied upon two-factor authentication. Increasingly, vendors are using the label “multifactor” to describe any authentication scheme that requires more than one identity credential.

 

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