Brand-new Mozilla Firefox features will help you figure out whether your passwords are good enough.
It’s part of an extraordinary legacy going back to the late 1990s, as our Internet and secure network systems evolved and became sophisticated enough to require a battery of passwords that hardly anyone can ever remember.
“Your brain wasn’t made to memorize all these passwords,” reads the tagline for Mozilla’s LockWise feature that’s emerging now in order to complement existing technologies that store and evaluate user passwords in order to promote more secure browsing.
Prior features notified users of places where data breaches had occurred. The new password manager system is a step forward in trying to help users to keep control of the blizzard of passwords that they use for online banking, subscription sign-ups, cloud services and more. The additional support helps users to handle threats that have become endemic to our modern web experience.
“Reusing passwords is convenient for trying to remember them, but it’s dangerously insecure,” writes Stephen Shankland at CNet this morning. “Once hackers discover passwords through data breaches, they often try those passwords all over the net with a type of attack called credential stuffing.”
To utilize all of the new features in Mozilla LockWise, the software maker provides a four-part instruction set: sign up for Firefox accounts, sync your logins in Firefox, install or set up Mozilla Firefox LockWise, and enable auto-fill.
All of this takes place in the context of a greater debate around how to handle authentication for user access. Biometrics is one field that’s seen a lot of research in the past few years – and there have also been changes in password philosophy, as experts now recommend ditching the complicated ‘special letter and character’ setups required on so many corporate-built network gateways.
Mozilla’s offer represents an advance in the concept of helping individual users to work smarter online, by freeing up more of their long-term memory and freeing them from burdensome password responsibilities.
Then, too, institutions are trying to figure out ways to move beyond yesterday’s labor-intensive password system.
“Are passwords a thing of the past?” asks Cara Bonnett at Educause, surveying today’s cybersecurity landscape. “Campus privacy and security professionals can adapt these materials to promote a better understanding of new developments in passwordless technology and to help students, faculty, and staff better protect their digital identities.”
Look for Mozilla’s offering to enhance web use as biometrics and multifactor authentication strive to allow us to move beyond the password system.
