#Rec tube password upgrade#

“You get a new phone and use the laptop to bless the phone and can kind of build yourself back up. “Let's say you leave your phone in a taxi, but you still have your laptop at home,” Google's Risher says. So passwordless schemes are moving toward systems where one device you've previously authenticated can anoint a new one as trustworthy. When security questions or a PIN serve as backup options, you're essentially still using passwords, just in a different format.

#Rec tube password upgrade#

Many people around the world share devices and can't upgrade them frequently, or they use feature phones, if anything.Īnd while passwordless implementations are increasingly standardized, account-recovery options are not.

In practice, that's a fairly narrow use case. Even with all of those pieces in place, many passwordless schemes work only on newer devices and necessitate the ownership of a smartphone along with at least one other device. The idea is that, eventually, you'll be able to do that for pretty much everything. You can also now use stand-alone physical tokens in certain cases to log in wirelessly and without a password. Those mechanisms work locally on your phone and don't require that companies store a big trove of user passwords-or your sensitive biometric details-on a server to check logins. You likely already use some version of this when you unlock your phone, say, with a scan of your face or your finger rather than a passcode. By contrast, passwordless logins authenticate with attributes that are innate and harder to steal, like biometrics. Hackers are more than happy to take advantage. Creating and managing them is annoying, so people often reuse them or choose easily guessable logins-or both. There's no doubt that passwords are an absolute security nightmare. The less-good news? You're still plugging passwords into multiple sites and services every day, and will be for a while. The good news is that the infrastructure-across all the major operating systems and browsers-is largely in place to support passwordless login. And one of the most tantalizing is the end of passwords. But there are also some seemingly more attainable goals that somehow also always feel just on the horizon. There are certain sci-fi promises the future is supposed to hold: jetpacks, flying cars, a Mars colony.