PayPal exec aims to “obliterate passwords from the face of the planet”

Unless burner phones become available that support FIDO protocols and that can be purchased for cash, this idea will make "Login with Facebook" seem like child's play by comparison.

David Chaum knew this all in 1980 and proposed a great solution: Allow each user to keep a database of pseudonymous identifiers such that one is associated with each organization will be automatically presented when needing to authenticate.

"Security without Identification Card Computers to make Big Brother Obsolete": http://www.chaum.com/articles/Security_Wthout_Identification...

Edit: It should also be noted that if you use multiple pseudoanymous identities no PKI is necessary which solves a major MITM and infrastructure problem. You simply link a public key to your paypal/gmail/whatever account upon creation. Only paypal/gmail/ needs to know about that mapping.

This is the umpteenth iteration of a bad idea.

If I scan my fingerprint in to authenticate or scan my retina, on a device that knows my physical location, that is a more literal check-in than anything that exists today. Essentially a check-in would have near absolute certainty that the actual person authenticating was at that place at that time.

That's scary to me; one may have a GPS on their phone today, but that's the phones identity, not the owners. If one signs ones credit cards with a thumb print or a retina scan, one is proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that one was present at that place at that time.

This may or may not be something one wants and one should be conscious of the realities of biometric authentication.

*Just because no one has presented a copy of a retina that can pass a retina scan does not mean one does not exist.

    The so-called "Internet of things" adds another wrinkle. Barrett talked about
    development of refrigerators that can sense what food is inside them and
    automatically order replacement groceries. Perhaps such technology will be
    commonplace in a few years—and your refrigerator will need a way to pay for food.

    "It begs the question, do you really want your refrigerator to know your PayPal
    password?" Barrett said. "Unless we can solve that problem, life is not going to
    be good."

The biometric solution discussed in the article doesn't even solve this problem. Do you really want your fridge to store your fingerprint or retina data?

The part I have a hard time understanding: even if you register your phone as a trusted device and scan your fingerprint on your phone to log in to paypal, all your phone is doing is sending a secret key to paypal's servers (where's it's presumably hashed and stored).

How does that solve the problems the article identifies?

    "Left to their devices users will pick horrible passwords and then they'll
    reuse them all over the place," Barrett said.
     
    Various data breaches have exposed millions of user IDs and passwords.
    While passwords are typically exposed in an obscured or "hashed" form,
    increasingly powerful processors and password cracking programs allow
    even novice hackers to convert them into plain text

Any system that's used to increase the security, entropy or uniqueness of your biometrics for each site you register with could equally be used to protect a single, strong master password instead. At least you could change that if it somehow got hacked.

Much easier. Malware will just switch to stealing those instead.

That pretty much went not too far.

Anything that requires you to carry an additional device is doomed to failure.

Something g which lets users delegate their security to some kind of sent, and then authenticate to it with various challenges (including biometrics), and allows a cooperative s unity policy between users and administrators (where each action has a different risk profile, so sending money to a pre approved account is low auth required vs something like changing your auth credentials...) is the solution. Not sure if this is it.

Looks worryingly "closed".

Also from what I've seen in the past most finger print scanning and cheap, "organic" identity verification tech is not reliable and easily circumvented.

Despite not being perfect, basic password authenication (or even better- pass-phrase) is a security mechanism that's easily understood, easy to implement and can be pretty secure.

(Although still possible to do badly/incorrectly as we keep seeing).