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Security
Is “Joe Sent Me” a Good Password?
Probably not. But Apple and others want to fix that.
No geekery follows. Just some fifties music and a story about a doorman. But first..
I am fairly confident that most of us have no love for passwords. Even if we follow the most strict protocols for choosing, storing, and changing these keys to our resources and secrets, passwords can still be annoying and dangerous.
A password manager can help, and is certainly recommended now, but it too has problems. Most can generate hard to crack passwords, but these sometimes aren’t accepted by websites, so we have to make up our own. Foolish website policies may require weaker passwords than we like. In any case, passwords are still stored on the server, hopefully encrypted, but still vulnerable to thieves.
Apple, Google, Microsoft and others want to get rid of passwords and replace them with a public/private key scheme. So far, I’ve only looked at what Apple is up to. The others will do something similar.
Don’t Panic!
You don’t need to understand PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to get the basic concept of how this will work. Don’t give yourself an unnecessary headache if tech mumbo-jumbo isn’t your bag. Here’s the general idea without…
