The ideal situation that the post-password paradigm puts forward is one in which users, no matter who or where they are, can prove their identity with incredible ease. Along with this comes the stipulation that users are tied to that identity and that identity only – pretending to be someone else, otherwise known as fraud, will be a left behind in the early millennia. Though it is naive to think that frausdsters will simply fall by the wayside without a fight, as Michael Barrett, president of the FIDO Alliance mentioned in his “The Password is Dead” webinar on Monday: even Touch ID, which was spoofed by Chaos Computer Club, still makes fraud attractive by virtue of preventing scalable attacks.
Tuesday marked the launch of a new company dedicated to making the world described above – a world without fraud – a reality, and that company’s name is Hoyos Labs.
A new venture, founded by Hector Hoyos, Hoyos Labs is making itself out to be a competent crusader in the war on passwords. Having already developed an end-to-end solution for identity authentication, Hoyos Labs is leveraging biometrics and mobile devices as part of a scalable solution.
Two notable pieces of the Hoyos Labs equation are its focus on liveness detection and its self-describes biometrics agnosticism. The liveness detection will address issues made apparent by the aforementioned Touch ID spoofing earlier this year, a much needed ingredient for a fraudless world. Biometric agnosticism is also important: even though Hoyos will be providing his own biometric solutions to provide the front end authentication, the back end can pair with any other biometric technology already on the market.
As the CEO of Hoyos Labs, Hector Hoyos christened the company, stating its mission:“When participating in any form of online activity, from accessing social media channels to conducting financial transactions, people are extremely vulnerable to hacking and identity theft due to the flimsy nature of usernames, log-ins and passwords. At Hoyos Labs, we are fusing our digital infrastructure security solutions and our biometric identification technologies into consumer- and corporate-ready solutions that can be deployed on devices like mobile phones. This solution will provide benefits for consumers, as well as companies, and will lower and ultimately eradicate fraud and identity theft.”
There is an immense truth to Hoyos’ declaration of password obsolescence: in 2011 the most common password used to protect English speaking usernames was “password.” It is an embarrassing statistic that invites fraud. With flexible end to end solutions like the one offered by Hoyos Labs, we will be able to move forward into the post-password paradigm leaving that statistic as a humorous historical footnote for future students of technology.
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