What Is Passwordless Authentication?

You’ll also learn about:
-Credential stuffing attacks
-Authentication factors
-Single sign-on (SSO)
-Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
-Reducing costs and freeing up IT resources by consolidating identity management, SSO, and MFA

Resources and social media:

#jumpcloud #passwordless #passwordlessauthentication

Transcript:

Did you know that 61% of data breaches in 2021 involved credentials? That's why many organizations are turning to other password solutions such as passwordless authentication. In this video, we'll explain what passwordless authentication is, how it works, and how to implement it to safeguard your business. Be sure to check out our other videos as well to learn more about security best practices. First things first, let's define passwordless authentication. Passwordless authentication is a method of verifying identity without using a password. Without passwords to steal, bad actors can no longer leverage credential stuffing, a technique in which they try logging into multiple sites at once with hijacked credentials, waiting for a hit. Now, you might be asking yourself, how can you log into something without a password? When you break it down, a password is simply a knowledge factor, meaning something you know. But as we've seen, this type of factor is prone to sharing, misuse and theft.

Passwordless authentication replaces that knowledge factor with something harder to steal or replicate, such as a possession or biometric factor. A possession factor is something you own or have. It could be an email address, phone, Fast Identity Online, aka FIDO authenticator or digital signature. A biometric factor is something you are, a factor that is inherent and unique to you, something like an iris scan, voiceprint or facial recognition. For each application that requires a password, you'll need to implement new forms of authentication using a possession or biometric factor, and that's a lot of work. To make implementation less daunting, companies split this process into several phases. The first is centralizing authentication. Consolidating logins decreases the number of passwords users need to remember. A good example of this is single sign-on or SSO.

Next, you enforce multifactor authentication or MFA. With MFA, users must verify multiple factors before being granted access to an application. Once those two phases are complete, companies can implement a FIDO login structure and scale it across the business. If you get the impression that this is a complex, costly process, you'd be right. That's why many companies implement passwordless authentication one element at a time, gathering feedback along the way. And if you already have a robust SSO solution in place to centralize authentication, layering MFA everywhere is the next logical step to a passwordless future. JumpCloud's frictionless authentication can prevent unauthorized access and bring you closer to a zero trust security model. Even better, you can free up IT resources and reduce costs by consolidating identity management, SSO and MFA tools into a single open directory platform. Learn more about JumpCloud by following the link in the description below, and subscribe to our channel for more videos like this one.