Don’t Ever Think About Passwords Again

By Deepak Gupta

Passwords have been an integral part of people's lives. Yet passwords are insecure and allow cybercriminals to attack businesses and their users. However, replacing passwords widely with better authentication methods wasn't practical.

 

Today, businesses of all sizes can eliminate passwords and introduce a more secure authentication using biometrics and passkeys. This short yet insightful eBook guides business leaders about how they can reduce reliance on passwords and fortify their cyber defenses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deepak Gupta
• Release date: Nov 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215601150

Deepak Gupta

Deepak Gupta is a dedicated and experienced cybersecurity and technology professional with years of experience in application and platform development, driving technological innovation, and creating user-centric solutions across the cybersecurity space. With over 15 years in the industry, Deepak has quickly made a name for himself as an industry leader and a product visionary with a knack for developing the right type of user solutions that can be seamlessly applied to a cybersecurity infrastructure. With an eye on the changing, growing, and evolving cybersecurity threats that continue to impede how we access our digital information and protect our digital identities, Deepak remains focused on reducing the chance of troubling data breaches, aggravating system downtime, and frustrating user experiences. In order to meet the needs of the changing cybersecurity space, Deepak continues to conduct robust research around customer identity and access management (CIAM). From there, he brings his knowledge back to his team, who strive to design and develop new features that continue solidifying LoginRadius’s standing as a leading provider of customer identity and access management. In addition to Deepak’s decorated career and prestigious education, he has also served as a keynote speaker for a wide variety of global events and conferences centered around data, cybersecurity, and technology. Deepak has spoken at Identity North, Microsoft’s India VC Summit, and more. Deepak has also authored several books in technology and cybersecurity, with one of his most popular titles including the Handbook of Computer Networks and Cybersecurity. Deepak currently writes for FastCompany, DevOps.com, CIO, Forbes, and others.

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Executive Summary

The smartphone has revolutionized the last decade; it improved people’s lives to the extent that it’s almost impossible to live without a smartphone in developed and rapidly developing countries. Then the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically increased the number of digital interactions in people’s lives, making it necessary for organizations to digitize their services as much as possible to sustain competition, retain customers, and drive growth.

A result of all this change is the need for consumers to create and manage more digital accounts to interact with and attain value from multiple apps, services, and platforms. And most of these accounts rely on passwords that the users manage insecurely, by setting easy-to-guess passwords, using the same password or a variation across multiple accounts, or insecurely managing the passwords. Consumers aren't the only ones struggling with passwords; password-related security issues and breaches have been costing businesses in terms of reputation, consumer trust, and revenue losses.

This has led to a growing interest in authentication methods that don’t rely on passwords as better alternatives. Although such authentication methods — for example, biometrics — have been in discussions theoretically for a while, only recently they became more practical and viable to implement for production-grade applications and use cases.

Currently, biometrics-based authentication is driven by the FIDO2 specification, which is led by a global alliance with board-level members like Apple, Amazon, American Express, Google, and Intel, among others. The specification