Goodbye passwords: Apple, Google and Microsoft united to remove them

Three IT giants team up to say goodbye to passwords: Apple, Google and Microsoft have agreed to work together to speed up the process that will eliminate login passwords across devices and platforms. They announced it a few days ago on their respective official websites, promising to expand support for the FIDO Alliance standard. Traditional passwords are now considered too weak for today's world.

On the other hand, security reports have been saying this for years: most breaches are caused by insecure passwords . In its latest report, Verizon said that 80% of successful attacks are related to a weak password choice. It is not difficult to believe it, since in Italy the most used passwords are still "123456", together with "qwerty" and "000000".

Apple, Google and Microsoft greet passwords

From now on, Apple, Google and Microsoft will launch several plans to support FIDO standards and eliminate the use of passwords . The focus is on greater security and a single platform that will allow you to use your smartphone to enter social profiles, bank accounts or any service.

In login procedures, the human component is undoubtedly the weakest . If we think of passwords, still many users use words that are too weak and easy to guess. The three tech giants have teamed up to develop an infrastructure capable of allowing login without a password, running on smartphones, computers and browsers.

According to what Apple reported on its blog, its own platforms and those of Google and Microsoft already support password-less access, but still require an initial step in which you are asked to enter the password. With the announcement of recent days, companies aim to eliminate this phase and completely eliminate the password.

But how will the new authentication system work? With the new FIDO standards, we will rely on private and public keys. Every time you register on a site or an application, the platform generates two keys, one private and one public: the first is kept on the smartphone, while the second is shared and stored in the database of the service to which you have registered. .

The private key can be a voice command, a wearable device to connect with, a token or even a biometric recognition mechanism. Certainly some weaknesses remain, but the main ones due to passwords chosen by the user are eliminated. The new system, according to the three companies, should come into effect as early as 2023.

The most used passwords

Passwords are universally recognized as the weakest login system. Most users don't even use a random password generator, nor do they use tools like safes to memorize them and end up forgetting them.

A report from NordPass found that the most used passwords of 2020 were sequences of numbers or words that were extremely easy to guess. The most used password in the world is 123456 , and it is also the most used in Italy. In our country 1,726,692 have chosen it as a "protection" for their accounts. Following is 123456789 and other variations of the sequence, while qwerty is in fifth position.

Italy also has many black and white fans, as the sixth most used password is juventus , followed by 000000 , password and andrea . There are many personal names used as passwords , but what is surprising is the difference in the average time to decrypt them: andrea needs less than 2 minutes to be pierced, while giuseppe requires at least 3 hours. Among the most common passwords there is also fuck you, used by 76,981 people; the average time to decipher it is 12 days.

The article Goodbye passwords: Apple, Google and Microsoft united to remove them was written on: Tech CuE | Close-up Engineering .