How Blockchain Can Make Passwords Obsolete

It feels like almost every day there is another data breach making the headlines. From banking to chatting with friends, the average person spends more than 10 hours online every day. However, most of the sites or online resources we use daily—from Facebook to Gmail—are secured using a simple password.

Most security breaches happen because of some sort of human weakness. A password may be too easy to guess, as studies show that 10,000 of the most common passwords, such as 123456 or qwerty, can access 98 percent of all accounts.

Other points of failure originate from people leaving their browsers open on public computers, writing passwords down on paper or in a file on their computers or simply getting tricked into giving away their login data.

Although we know what safe passwords should be, we tend to ignore this knowledge in favor of using easy-to-remember passwords because the fear of forgetting is stronger than the fear of being hacked.

BLOCKCHAIN TO THE RESCUE

A larger problem is the centralized architecture of the database storing logins and passwords on a server. Which means, if it’s been hacked, all data can be accessed at once. Unfortunately, even Two Factor Authentication (2FA) has been proven to be penetrable through social engineering.

REMME is a startup seeking to make passwords obsolete, thus eliminating the human factor from the authentication process, and therefore preventing such attacks from ever happening. REMME claims that by solving the problem of central servers that can be hacked, malicious attacks such as phishing, server and password breach, and password reuse will become useless.

Instead of a password, REMME gives each device a specific SSL certificate. The certificate data is managed on the Blockchain, so a fake certificate will never work. By using this method, the startup got rid of the authentication server and password database. As a consequence, hackers have no potential central server target, which means no weak point. REMME claims “100 percent protection against common attacks.”

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https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-blockchain-can-make-passwords-obsolete