Ever watched a movie where the villain breach over the security system of a corporation or a secret lab using some sort of tools, like wearing mask or fake fingerprint to bypass the body scanning authentication, using voice changer to bypass the voice authentication, or even just use a notebook to crack the password of a gate? I bet most of you had. There are tons of films like that such as Mission Impossible, Spy Kids, and other Thrilling Spy Action related film. As you can see in the film. The corporation have already implemented a very strong authentication method on their system. Yet the villain always able to breach it easily. Okay, that is just a film. But you know that those things might actually happened in real live. And when that happen, all of us will be in serious trouble. No account will be save, no authentication method that won’t be breached, and worse the internet will be in a great disaster.
With the fast growth of information technology nothing seems to be impossible now. Security is one thing that must always be paid attention to. With the fast growth of hacking technique, knowledge of security must also counterbalance it by developing a stronger security system. One essential issue is about authentication. You know that nowadays people in the world use authentication in a lot of things such as email, social media account, online shop, ATM card, etc. But, how secure is actually that type of authentication? In this article I will try to discuss every type of authentication, what is the weakness, what can we do to overcome that weakness, and what is the best authentication method to be used. Okay, lets get started.
Authentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a datum or entity. This might involve confirming the identity of a person or software program, tracing the origins of an artifact, ensuring that a product is what its packaging and labeling claims to be. (Wikipedia). Or in my opinion, authentication is an act to confirm that someone or something is allowed to access something. There are a lot of things out there that we, consciously or unconsciously require authentication, whether it is by password, by some device, or even by our fingerprint. There are three types of authentication, the first is authentication by something you know, second is authentication by something you have, and the last is authentication by something you are. Three of them have its own pros and cons.