Researchers from London’s Royal Holloway University designed a tool to fight against phishing using a tool called Uni-IDM(IDSpace). This identity management tool has been introduced to improve security and usability for user authentication. At this point in time, password based authentication has been used all over the world for authentication. As per the university research identify theft has rose more than three hundered percent from 2011 to 2012 and none of the counter measure are working accurately.
The paper written by Haitham & Chris describes , a client-based identity management tool called IDSpace, designed to address this problem by providing a single user interface and user experience for user authentication, whilst supporting a range of existing identity management technologies.
The goal as described was to simplify the use of the wide range of existing technologies, helping to encourage their use, whilst imposing no additional burden on existing service providers and identity providers. Operation of IDSpace with certain existing systems is described in the paper. (Link)
“We’ve known for a long time that the username/password system is problematic and very insecure, and it’s a headache for even the largest websites,” said Chris Mitchell, professor of Royal Holloway’s information security group.
The scale of the phishing problem is huge. “LinkedIn was hacked and more than 6 million stolen user passwords were then posted on a website used by Russian cybercriminals. Facebook also admitted in 2011 that 600,000 of its user accounts were being compromised every single day,” Mitchell pointed out.
Despite how common big data breaches are becoming, the username/password combo remains the dominant login technology. “While large corporations are using more secure methods, attempts to provide individuals with similar protection have been unsuccessful — except in cases such as online banking,” Mitchell said. “Our hope is to provide a more sophisticated technology to protect all Internet users.”
The link to the paper from Royal Holloway from University of London can be found here
