Identity and Authentication - Alternative Authentication Methods

Single Sign-on (SSO)

The Single Sign-on or trusting someone else to answer the question who is making the request? Single Sign-on gives us a bunch of benefits. First, we don’t have to perform the actual authentication. We’re trusting that some engineers at a large robust system is doing this for us well. Additionally makes the sign-on attempt a little bit easier for our users by allowing them to use services they’re probably already logged into.

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Multi-Factor Authentication

One of the problems we’ve seen with passwords is a user can easily share it with someone else, or a third party can steal that password and gain access to a system. Multi-factor authentication gives us one layer of trust on top of a password. Essentially, it trusts that you and only you have access to something physical or sensitive and secure.

If you have used multi-factor auth before, it’s most commonly implemented through something like a text-based interface. When you log in, some kind of code is sent to your cell phone, and this code works once and only once, and only sent to your cell phone.

An alternative to generating the code on our server and having it sent to our user would be to generate the code on the device itself. This is often done with something called a decaying temporal algorithm. This is a code that uses some kind of cryptography to generate a random number that corresponds to a specific time. Only the device and the service knows that code at any given instance in time.

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Biometric Authentication

Probably the most difficult to break type of authentication is biometric auth. In this case, it would be extremely difficult for someone to take a part of your body and use it to authentication into a system. The most commonly realized version of this is fingerprint authentication on your cell phones. These systems are often fairly complicated and fairly robust.

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Depending on what you’re implementing and deploying, you might have different levels of risk and different levels of need for how secure your information must be. Mixing and matching these and other types of authentication can help you to keep your system secure and your data safe.