Authentication? What is it?
about the Secure verification
If there have a trustful relationship between two different parties, the word “Authentication” plays a major role in this digital era. Let's get into the deep of Authentication.
What is Authentication?
To get an idea about the authentication, I like to mention a fact about the ancient Roman army. A general in the Roman army may have led thousands of soldiers but couldn’t personally them all. if one of those soldiers was to walk down the street and claim to be part of his army, he’d need some way to prove it. As a method for it, they use watchwords to identify each other. Today also we have to prove our identity when we interact with others. but these days, we don’t use primary authentication methods to prove our identity. Besides watchwords, we have social security things such as passports, Identity cards, Licences etc.
In this digital age, we have to highly interact with digital devices and have to be highly concerned about information security. these things have tended to ourselves for digital identity and secure authentication methods. So let's find out the history of digital Authentication and the development of the authentication methods.
Evolution of Digital Authentication
In the late ’60s, there were only analogue devices in use and only a few people had access to them. But according to the development of the Computer science field, new trends came out and more people got engaged. as a result of it, there were developed centralised computer systems with multi-user accessibility. Then occurred a problem how does one user keep his or her files private from another user?
Fernando Corbato, an MIT researcher, later professor, and one of the pioneers of CTSS, solved that problem in 1961 by using passwords and it is the first method used to authenticate to computers. Passwords are the most common way to authenticate and use present also. But there were poped up some issues in using passwords and scientists in those days try out solutions to gain more secure authentication.
After 1970, there were many developments in authentication and cryptology areas because scientists worked to increase the security of computer-aided data and information. Below you can see the milestones of the Digital Authentication technology.
- Protected passwords with Salted hash(in '70s)
- Public-key cryptography surfaces(Mid the 70's)
- One-Time-Passwords emerge or OTP (in '80s)
- Public key infrastructure or PKI (in '90s)
- use CAPTCHA’s for authentication(Mid the 90s)
Especially, CAPTCHAs came into the stage in the middle of the 90s. The word meaning of CAPTCHA is “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart”.The method that using in here is put content that only humans can identify. So, It cannot use to authenticate people but It only has the ability to identify humans apart from a machine. This technique is used to prevent automated authentication attacks like brute-force password attacks. There are three types of CAPTCHAs that we can see today such as text-based,picture-based and sound-based.
What is Multifactor Authentication (MFA)?
There can be used of two or more factors for digitally authenticating people as a better way to authenticate. In the age of 2000, this technique has been popularized in the digital world after examining previous decades. So, Simply using multiple factors for authentication is called Multi Factor Authentication or MFA.
There have used three types of factors in MFA. When considering a single person there has something that person knows, has or is. Something the person knows like his favourite colour, a password, a pin etc. he/she can have a digital certificate or smart card etc. Also, something that person “is” his face, iris, fingerprint etc.
The minimum MFA is 2-Factor Authentication which uses two elements for authentication. The bank cards normally use 2FA for authentication. After 2000 general public starts to use MFA regularly and became more popular. Combining more factors grant a stronger and more secure authentication process.
Multifactor Authentication supplies a more reliable and secure solution to prevent security threats to Systems. Also, It can add additional protection for the user side and It assures user identity. Adding various security layers like in MFA is a simpler method to add next-level security for systems than adding a number of complex security passwords sequentially. In the present cyber security world MFA has become a major component in achieving data protection.
Future of Authentication
Since 2010, Using Multifactor Authentication has become cheaper with less complexity. So It is started being used in General for all kinds of user authentication systems.MFA has been more developed with this advanced usage. Today smartphones are highly using these MFA methods. If you ever use a smartphone or a laptop you should have already used various types of Multifactor Authentication to access that device. Today devices are highly usable and user friendly as they use biometric authentications such as fingerprint, voice & facial recognition, iris recognition and palm or finger vein patterns to identify and authenticate access.
Nowadays MFA has become a very common thing so we can see it everywhere. Authentication is a great factor when we consider data security. It has quite a long history and still growing by connecting more advanced security features and layers.
