Employees are among the fundamental elements of any organization. Yet sadly, most of the security issues arise because of employee negligence and errors.
One common mistake employees make is the use of weak passwords. A Verizon report has revealed that 81% of data breaches occur because of weak, stolen or misused passwords. However, it is increasingly looking like passwords are on their way out. According to Gartner, by 2022, 90% of the mid-sized and 60% of global enterprises will shift towards passwordless authentication methods.
But what does it mean?
Passwordless authentication is a process that verifies a user's identity with something other than a password. It strengthens security by eliminating password management practices and the risk of threat vectors. It is an emerging subfield of identity and access management and will revolutionize the way employees work.
Here's an insight into why more organizations are turning to passwordless authentication and how you can install it.
Why Use Passwordless Authentication?
Credential theft and password misuse continue to grow. As a result, organizations are heading towards passwordless authentication to address the failure of passwords and protect access to data, systems and networks.
For enterprises, the need for passwordless authentication is more crucial. It also minimizes the havoc of creating new passwords every three months, while costs for the IT department are lowered as no investment is made in password managers.
Here are insights into how passwordless authentication benefits organizations:
Stronger Cybersecurity Posture
Enterprises experience losses of $3.92m on average from data breaches. If cyber-criminals get access to your passwords, it means that they have access to the company's confidential data. They can even get into other employees' data and can alter it too. However, there is no need to worry about data or identity theft with passwordless authentication. It's because the hardware token only gives access to a few privileged users.
Protection Against Phishing Attacks
Phishing is the most prevalent type of cyber-attack, comprising more than 80% of reported attacks. In most cases, the attacker aims to deceive the users into compromising their login credentials.
Passwordless authentication uses some modern authentication methods that reduce the risk of being targeted via phishing attacks. With this approach, employees won't need to provide any sensitive information to the threat actors that give them access to their accounts or other confidential data when they receive a phishing email.
Improve Supply Chain Security
With passwordless authentication, it won't be easy for any third party to compromise the network and enter the database to install malicious code on the target's site. Hence, this modern authentication method prevents software supply chain attacks and improves supply chain security.
Greater Workforce Productivity
Employees are asked to generate solid and complex passwords to improve security standards. This practice has become quite demanding and makes employees frustrated. They have to remember a series of passwords whenever they login somewhere.
But with passwordless authentication, they would have more convenient and secure authentication options. This would allow users to gain quick and easy access to resources and result in less frustration.
How Can Your Business Achieve Passwordless Authentication?
Passwordless authentication is relatively a new approach. But it can be pretty daunting to choose the type of implementation that caters to your needs. There are different ways to deploy passwordless authentication. These include:
- Biometric authentication: This uses unique physical traits to verify a person without asking for a password.
- Magic links : This method asks for the user’s email address in the login box. The user receives a link in their email, and upon clicking it, can log in to their accounts. The link expires within a few hours, and users receive a new link each time they log in.
- Push notifications: Here, users receive a push notification via a dedicated authenticator app on their mobile devices. Just open the app through a push notification and verify the identity.
- One-time passwords: This method requires users to enter a code received via email or text message. The code is sent each time a user logs in.
Another effective passwordless authentication method is Single-Sign-On. This enables employees to access all their accounts without creating or remembering complex passwords.
Challenges in the Path of Passwordless Authentication
Passwordless authentication appears to be a secure and easy-to-use approach, but there are challenges in its deployment. The most significant issue is the budget and migration complexity. While setting up a budget for passwordless authentication, enterprises should include costs for buying hardware and its setup and configuration.
Another challenge is dealing with old-school mentalities. Most IT leaders and employees are reluctant to move away from traditional security methods and try new ones.
Enterprises should execute the public key-based passwordless authentication with different levels of protection. For this, they need to use both hardware and software-based cryptography modules on the client side. However, this would be a real challenge for any software development company. A wrong step in deployment can make the organization vulnerable to software supply chain attacks.
Parting Words
Moving from conventional passwords to a more secure authentication method improves an organization’s overall security.
Such an approach saves time and resources as the company no longer has to deal with password maintenance and resets. Additionally, employees enjoy more peace of mind at work. For all these reasons, it's recommended to use passwordless authentication to protect business integrity.