Open sesame: Lessons in password-based user authentication
Bahman Rashidi, Vaibhav Garg · Cyber security. · 2021
The cost of unusable password policies in the wild is well documented. These costs impinge both business and security. The alternative is to move to multi-factor and risk-based authentication, which include software authenticators, hardware tokens, and biometrics. This paper provides an overview of the research in this area and concludes with guidance on how to best leverage password-based authentication. We recommend that designers should only implement efforts backed by empirical evidence, offer solutions to reduce user effort, and use compensating controls to address the underlying limitations of passwords.