Accelerating adoption of anti-phishing authentication methods

President Biden’s new 2023 National Security Strategy outlines the need to shift the burden of security from individuals and small businesses to large institutions. Password-based authentication puts individuals and organizations at risk, but moving towards passwordless technologies is hard due to the overwhelming number of choices and the lack of data around the unmitigated costs. Inline with the IT lab’s E-Authentication project and draft roadmap, the goal is to accelerate the use of easy-to-use passwordless technologies through thoughtful standards and self-service tools. The R&D effort in the proposal is to research MFA and passwordless technologies, do a cost-benefit analysis focused on moving from passwords to passwordless technology, 40+ interviews to understand the total scope of effort to move from legacy authentication, to align data types being captured to NIST and industry standards, and create a framework to make faster, better decisions. This effort also is focused on creating a set of open-source tools to allow app developers to understand the real cost of passwords, data breaches, and the benefits of moving to passwordless and MFA technology.