Authentication

Authentication, at its core, is the validation of your identity by presenting a combination of four factors to a validation mechanism. They are:

Something you know: a password, passcode, PIN, passphrase, etc.
Something you have: an ID card, smart card, trusted device/phone, etc.
Something you are: biometric characteristics such as fingerprint, face recognition, iris/retina, voice, etc.
Somewhere you are: geolocation, IP address, etc.

The use of passwords

The most common and widely used authentication method is still the use of passwords. But what is a password? A password or passphrase can be generally defined as a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols in a string for identity validation. For example, if we work with passwords and take a standard 8-digit password that consists only of upper case letters and numbers, we would get a total of 36⁸ (208,827,064,576) possible passwords.

A survey conducted by Google and Harris Poll in 2019 reveals that 24% of Americans have used passwords like 123456, qwerty and password. At the time, only 15% of Americans used password managers. It is also stated that 22% used their name, and 33% used the name of their pet or children. Another critical statistic is the password re-use across multiple accounts being 66%. This means that 66% of all Americans, according to this statistic, have used the same password for multiple platforms.

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Therefore, once we have obtained or guessed a password, there is a 66% chance that we could use it to authenticate ourselves on other platforms with the user's ID (username or email address). This would, of course, require that we are able to guess the user's user ID, which, in many cases, is not difficult to do.

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