"Technology should be smarter than this!": A vision for overcoming the great authentication fatigue

Abstract

Security researchers identified 15 years ago that passwords create too much of a burden on users. But despite much research activity on alternative authentication mechanisms, there has been very little change for users in practice, and the implications for individual and organisations productivity are now severe. I argue that - rather than looking for alternative 'front-end' solutions, we must re-think the nature of authentication: we must drastically reduce the number of explicit authentication events users have to participate in, and use advanced technologies to implicitly authenticate users, without disrupting their productive activity. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.