4 ms·

> Yes, passwords are awful and don’t work. Passwords are awesome. A bigger, better solution is immanent, but a password does the job just fine for most uses. P

• akerl_ 12y ago
  Passwords carry some of the blame for being a pain in the ass to manage at scale. Because grandpa doesn't know about password managers or the xkcd method (he just wants to get to his email), he picks bad passwords and reuses them. Passwords have enabled him to shoot himself in the foot, alongside the troves of similar folks. Passwords aren't the problem, but they're enabling the problem and because of that they certainly aren't awesome.
• arnarbi 12y ago
  > the fault of those who use poor passwords or reuse them across dozens of applications That's the reality, and that's the sole argument for why passwords suck. We can't blame the users on this one, we just have to give them something better.
• dllthomas 12y ago
  "The concept of a password" has two big problems: 1) They're symmetric. I need to protect the thing I need to provide. If we can contrive to make sure that the thing I need to provide it to can be safely trusted, then this problem only manifests itself in the face of password reuse, but assumptions break sometimes. 2) Enough entropy to be uncrackable is starting to be enough entropy to be difficult to remember. Password safes and similar address both of these - at the expense of increased exposure to slightly different threats but for a net win. They're a slight departure from "the concept of a password", though, I'd say.