Wouldn biometric authentication eliminate password management costs, which are huge?
Smith: They replace password management costs with the maintenance of these biometric readers, which are hardware devices that break down and must be replaced. What is the best authentication system for SSO? Smith: Single sign-on means different things to different people. I suspect the most practical approach today are those based on centralized authentication servers like Secure Computing’s SafeWord PremierAccess or perhaps those that piggy-back atop Microsoft domain authentication or the newer Kerberos implementation. It’s important to decide how much convenience you want and how that trades off against your security concerns. A problem with the central servers is that it provides a single, tempting target for an attacker. In practice, the SafeWord servers have been in operation since the ’80s, and I’ve heard no reports of server penetrations. To purchase “Authentication: From Passwords to Public Keys,” click here.
