The official web standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium, said there are many CAPTCHA alternatives, including simple maths questions, trivia, the use of sound files and even biometric technology such as fingerprints and retinal scanning. Microsoft have launched a substitute called Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), that asks users to identify photos of cats and dogs instead of letters.
With so many individuals with multiple accounts on so many linked cloud services, it is inevitable that this sort of cybercrime is going to become more commonplace unless new mechanisms are put into place to prevent this form of compromise that Honan experienced.
One way of dealing with this would be to employ biometrics on all computing devices. I wrote about this at length in February 2011, which eventually led to an appearance on CBC Radio alongside prominent independent security researcher Dr. Markus Jakobsson.
Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.That's just a sample. It's well worth reading the whole thing.
But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.
Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.
The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.
As everyone in the security business knows, there is no perfect answer. Gartner's Allan points out that "whatever the desirable level of assurance, it has to be balanced against cost (deployments for hundreds of thousands of users are very cost sensitive) and user experience. We know that bank customers may change their banks if new security features such as authentication degrade the user experience: in a survey a couple of years ago, Gartner found that 3% of customers had done so, and a further 12% considered it," adds Allan.Because there's no perfect answer, the challenge is in how to adopt new technologies that show positive return on investment without tying a mission-critical business process up in something that might not be the optimal solution over the longer term. How do you adopt new technologies in a way that preserves your ability to continue to adopt new technologies?
"The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras."Online retailers are able to free-ride on investments made by their brick-and-mortar competitors (see showrooming). They also have more powerful tools available to them for the purposes of analyzing detailed reports of user activity on retail websites. Why, the page I linked to for this story has fifteen programs that track your interaction with the linked page and TechnologyReview.com isn't even selling anything directly. The image to the left shows the list as compiled by the Ghostery add-on for Firefox.
They argue researchers need to revisit the subject of how to get passwords to work efficiently rather than assuming the approach is about to be written off as hopelessly flawed and unfixable. Passwords are here to stay, even though they certainly not appropriate in all cases, because "no other single technology matches their combination of cost, immediacy and convenience that many scenarios require". The researchers are, however, careful to note that there are many cases where passwords are not the best-fit.NIST wants small form-factor, tamper-resistant and handheld fingerprint sensor (Bank Info Security)
"Passwords have proved themselves a worthy opponent: all who have attempted to replace them have failed," the two boffins conclude. "It is fair to say that little progress has been made in the last 20 years: usability has degraded significantly, while security has not improved. The reasons, we suggest, are widespread confusion about why we are trying to replace them, what is required of a replacement, and what improvement is expected once they are replaced."
The goal of this initiative, for which NIST will provide funding, is to produce a fully functional, handheld device that's capable of biometric acquisition, and controlled through web services as specified in NIST Special Publication 500-288: Specification for WS-Biometric Devices.Those of strong constitution might consider clicking here for the NIST Solicitation (PDF), though I cannot recommend it.
NIST recognizes the ubiquity of the Internet and its impact on commerce - the agency, after all, is part of the U.S. Commerce Department - and the need for tools that can assure safe online transactions.
A faulty initial design – with net protocols that rely on trust and freely allow anonymity – has been compounded by the slow rollout of security gear, he says.
“I can do a very good job,” says Mr Eisen, whose company tries to keep pace with advancements in the cybercrime underworld. “But in the long run, it is essentially hopeless.”
So, what would a secure internet look like? Mr Eisen has set out plans for Internet 2 in a document called Project Phoenix. Included in his blueprint are biometric identification, encryption of all keystrokes and virtual machines created for every transaction.
