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And so here is that sort of balancing act, trying
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to figure out this balance between the usability of the account, just how user
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friendly it is to access, versus the security of that account.
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And finding that inflection point is somewhat personal or somewhat
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corporate in policy, typically.
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Well, let me pause here and see if there are any questions now
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on securing our accounts via passwords alone.
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AUDIENCE: I was wondering.
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A couple of years ago, there were devices, USB devices,
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with fingerprint recognition.
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How come that's not more frequently used?
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Or are they too expensive or--
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DAVID MALAN: A really good question, and we'll
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come to this topic in a little bit on biometrics more generally.
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But your intuition is pretty much right.
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It's expensive to have another device.
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And most consumers are not going to bother wasting money
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on something just for them.
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Some companies might.
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But if they have a lot of employees, that could get very costly.
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But you might be glad to know that one of the topics we'll end on today
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is a new technology called passkeys that actually leverages
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a device you most likely already have, a phone, that might use your fingerprint
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or might use your face or some other form of biometrics.
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That's becoming more common nowadays, or soon will,
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even for your laptop and desktop which will talk to that phone, in some form.
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How about one more question here on securing accounts.
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AUDIENCE: My question is, why if four-digits password is so unsafe,
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why is some program still using this password not a website, like program?
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DAVID MALAN: Oh, really good question.
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Why are some programmers using this?
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So it's a trade off between usability and security.
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If you are the programmer designing the system,
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you presumably want users to use the system and to come back
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and to keep using it.
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But if you make it too hard for them to access
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that account, if you increase the probability that they're
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going to constantly forget their password, lose their password,
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they might just stop using your system or your app or your website altogether.
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And so that's probably not a good thing.
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Other reasons might include just unawareness
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or not having taken a class on cybersecurity or not having really
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thought through the implications of having such short passcodes.
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So nowadays is industry's starting to nudge us
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in better and better directions.
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But we'll see today and the rest of this class
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that there are still going to be a lot of trade offs, again, between usability
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and security.
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So what can we do to defend ourselves against these brute force attacks?
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Well, at least here in the US, there's an organization
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called the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
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Otherwise known as NIST, that actually issues recommendations
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for how we as consumers or companies or more generally,
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humans can go about securing their accounts more effectively.
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And we thought we'd share just some of these recommendations
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so that it informs not only your own behavior as an individual citizen
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or consumer, but perhaps if you're in a place of business
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where you can influence your own company's policies,
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here are generally what are considered best practices nowadays.
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So a quote from their recommendations, "memorized secrets
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shall be at least eight characters in length."
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So that at least corroborates the quick math and the test
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that we ourselves just ran, that only once we got up to, like,
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6 quadrillion possibilities did it feel like it
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was going to take a very long time to actually hack into someone's device.
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So consider that for your own accounts, even on your phones.
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You might have to go through a few menu options
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to upgrade from just four digits to something more.
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But odds are you'll benefit from this additional layer of security.
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This one's more of a mouthful but helpful
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as well, "verifiers," so the website or app that's
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verifying your input when you authenticate with your username
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and password-- "verifiers should permit subscriber-chosen memorized secrets
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of at least 64 characters in length.
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All printing ASCII characters as well as the space characters
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should be acceptable in memorized secrets.
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Unicode characters should be accepted as well."
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Now, if you're not yourself a computer person,
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there's a bit of jargon within this.
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But first of all, the takeaways are that websites and applications should
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let you and me come up with passwords that
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are actually as long as 64 characters.
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Now, that's pretty long, but that's exactly the point,
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particularly as it's gotten more difficult
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for you and I to remember all of our passwords,
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to come up with very complex passwords.
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The reality is you and I might very well be better off,
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on the whole, by just choosing an easier-to-remember but much longer
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password, for instance, a sentence, a quote, a phrase that you
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can more easily keep in your human mind but that doesn't necessarily
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have a crazy amount of punctuation or digits or letters,
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but at least is 64 characters in length.
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So even if an adversary tries a dictionary attack,
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trying all possible English words or some other language,
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even if they try a brute force attack, it's going to take them way too long
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unless, of course, you do something foolish like choose a 64-character
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passcode that's 000 or so forth.
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So you still want to be original within that space.
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Now, more technically, this recommendation is referring to ASCII.
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ASCII generally refers to US English symbols on a US English keyboard,
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