Pico: No More Passwords! (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

Virgil Gligor (session chair): We have a session about passwords and you will hear at least two different points of view—possibly even two contradictory points of view, which is par for the course for this workshop. Our first speaker is Frank Stajano who argues that there should be no more passwords.

Frank Stajano: My title should give you a hint about my position towards this problem. What’s a password? A password is a way to drive users crazy!

Passwords were not so bad when you had only one or two of them, and when a password of eight or nine characters was considered a safe password. Nowadays computers have grown so powerful that ten character passwords can be brute-forced with the kind of computer you buy in the supermarket next to your groceries. And you don’t just have one or two passwords: you have dozens of them, because there are so many more services that now require you to have a password.