The Death of the Password

English

Are passwords outdated? It's starting to seem like it. Everybody hates them, and nobody can remember all the ones they've created. These days a typical netizen has dozens of online accounts. If you really want to be safe, you need to have a different password for each one, and each password needs to be incredibly complicated, with a mix of capital letters, symbols, and numbers.

TIP

密码过时了吗？现在看来确实如此。每个人都讨厌密码，而且没人能记住自己创建的所有密码。如今，一个普通的网民通常拥有数十个在线账户。如果你真的想要安全，就需要为每个账户设置不同的密码，而且每个密码都必须非常复杂，包含大写字母、符号和数字。

English

Who can keep all that stuff in their head? Most people don't bother. Some just make up one password and use it everywhere. Others might have a few passwords-one for all their banking and financial stuff, one for their social networks, one for email. Problem is that if one site gets attacked by hackers, they now have the password that you use elsewhere. These hacks are happening so frequently these days that you might as well assume there is no way to keep a password secret.

TIP

谁能把这些密码都记在脑子里呢？大多数人根本不用费心。有些人干脆就编一个密码，到处都用。还有些人可能有几个密码——一个用于所有银行和金融账户，一个用于社交网络，一个用于电子邮件。问题是，如果一个网站遭到黑客攻击，他们就掌握了你在其他地方使用的密码。如今这类黑客攻击事件频发，你或许会认为密码根本就无法保密。

English

In one recent attack on Sony, millions of accounts were exposed.Computer scientists realize the system is broken, and they're looking for alternatives. But most attempts haven't been very good. Fingerprint readers require special hardware, and a lot of people find them creepy and don't want to use them. Smart cardsand tokens can be lost or stolen.

TIP

在最近针对索尼的一次攻击中，数百万账户被泄露。计算机科学家意识到系统已崩溃，他们正在寻找替代方案。但大多数尝试都不太奏效。指纹读取器需要特殊的硬件，很多人觉得它们很可怕，不愿使用。智能卡和令牌可能会丢失或被盗。

English

We've tried all sorts of other approaches, but we end up back with passwords. They're the least worst in a series of bad options," says Rich Mogull, CEO of Securosis, a security consultancy. Markus Jakobsson, a veteran security researcher with a Ph.d. in computer science, has come up with something he calls "fastwords." Instead of inventing an obscure password, you join three simple words that come from a thought known only to you.

TIP

我们尝试过各种各样的方法，但最终还是选择了密码。安全咨询公司 Securosis 的首席执行官里奇·莫古尔 (Rich Mogull) 表示：“在一系列糟糕的选择中，密码是最不糟糕的选择。” 资深安全研究员、计算机科学博士马库斯·雅各布森 (Markus Jakobsson) 发明了一种名为“快速词”的方法。你无需编写晦涩难懂的密码，只需将三个简单的单词组合在一起，这些单词的灵感只有你自己知道。

English

If one day you were driving to work and ran over a frog that ended up flat, you might choose "frog work flat."Some advantages: You can enter the three words in any order ("flat frog work"), and the system still knows that you're you. If you totally blank, the fastword system will tell you one of the three words, which should enable you to remember the original thought and thus the three keywords. Jakobsson says one large service provider is evaluating the fastwords concept.

TIP

如果有一天你开车上班，撞到了一只扁平的青蛙，你可能会选择“frog work flat”。它有一些优点：你可以按任意顺序输入这三个词（“flat frog work”），系统仍然会识别出你。如果你完全没有记忆，快速词系统会告诉你三个词中的一个，这应该能让你记住最初的想法，从而记住这三个关键词。雅各布森表示，一家大型服务提供商正在评估快速词的概念。