The Smartphone was a Turning Point for Multi-Factor Authentication

TypingDNA has released a lengthy primer that details the evolution of multi-factor authentication (MFA) over the past several decades. The company explains that while two-factor authentication has been around since at least the mid-’90s, it did not gain traction until technology advancements made authentication more user-friendly over a decade later.

In that regard, TypingDNA cited the advent of the modern smartphone as a major turning point for authentication. Before that, companies needed to maintain expensive authentication infrastructure, while consumers needed to suffer through an inconvenient authentication process. Smartphones, on the other hand, gave millions of people access to a device-based form of identity verification, and to biometric factors once companies like Apple started introducing phones with fingerprint sensors and facial recognition cameras.

After that, governments followed with legislation to help enforce new security standards in regulated industries. Seventy percent of companies now use MFA to protect their internal systems, while 26 percent of individual consumers have activated MFA on their personal accounts and devices.

“The boost in MFA’s popularity happened when technological advancements and legislation were leveraged for global cybersecurity purposes,” TypingDNA wrote in its primer.

However, cybersecurity remains a problem despite those advances. The annual cost of data breaches is expected to reach $6 trillion by 2021. What’s more, 97 percent of those breaches are now accomplished with social engineering techniques rather than malware, with more than half (56 percent) of the population acknowledging that it has received and clicked on a phishing URL at some point in time.

That’s why MFA remains more important than ever, and why companies are still trying to create better forms of security. As a typing biometrics specialist, TypingDNA specifically highlighted the utility of behavioral biometrics, which is more difficult to spoof than a static biometric modality like a fingerprint. It is also more secure than knowledge-based factors like passwords, which can be guessed or intercepted.

TypingDNA has repeatedly stressed that organizations can use keystroke dynamics to comply with Europe’s incoming PSD2 regulations.

(Originally posted on Mobile ID World)