Authentication

We all have a life outside Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter – but we have forgotten the password for it’! 🙂 goes the latest security quote that shows the importance of passwords and authentication.
We live in a world where we are authenticating ourselves all the time! Did you know? You enter the ‘username’ and ‘password’ and boom! you are inside a particular website. So, now what is authentication exactly?

‘Authentication’ is proving who you are to the system to access the appropriate resources.

The most popular way to authenticate yourself is through the classic ‘username and password’ combination. As an example, in order to access any social media site you enter your ‘username’ and ‘password’. The ‘username’ and ‘password’ are compared against an existing database and once they match, the username is allowed to access the resources. This is a simplified process of authentication.

Three factors that influence ‘authentication’:

There are three factors that ‘authentication’ is based on – something that you have(smartphone or laptop or tablet), what you know(password) and what you are(biometrics) 

Strong authentication makes use of two factors . The username-password combination makes use of – something that you have(namely laptop or smartphone) and something that you know(password)

Biometrics:
Since the classic username and password combination might be fraught with different types of difficulties, authentication of a user can also be established by making use of ‘biometrics‘. ‘Biometrics’ makes use of the physical features of a person(like fingerprint, retina) to perform authentication.
But it must be noted that ‘biometrics’ alone cannot be used to validate a user – it has to be coupled with another factor of authentication to validate the user.