My point is: given that, to have an acceptable user experience, we have to do the check on the client side, there has to be a good reason, a real use case that creates a possible vulnerability to justify a duplication of the check on the server side.
PINs can facilitate a quicker, more usable experience. Signing in with a shorter PIN code instead of a password might help somewhat with issues related to password usability and fatigue. Besides, PINs are often associated with specific device-PIN combinations, minimizing the risk of exposure if the PIN is compromised. However, when it comes to security, which one is the better choice - PINs or passwords? Neither.
Is there any reason a password and pin combination isn’t more popular
Both PINs and passwords suffer from the same fundamental flaws - they rely on human beings to authenticate users. Like passwords, PINs are credentials that depend upon human memory and input, so in the end, there is no difference between the two since all connected services rely on passwords. Ultimately, both methods are inferior to passwordless authentication, and here is why.
However, while PINs do add another layer of security on top of passwords, they come with the same set of problems that plague passwords - humans, and their difficulty remembering long and complex combinations of digits and letters.
Adjudication is the process we use to resolve questions. We will call to gather more information about an unemployment insurance claim. Your claim may go to adjudication if there are questions about why you left your job, or are meeting other eligibility requirements. During adjudication, we will make a determination about your claim based on the current information we have, additional information we receive from you, your previous employer and even other sources.
In broad terms, a claim goes to adjudication if it raises questions about why you left your job, or your eligibility for benefits. For example, if you said on your application that you were fired from your job, we'll need to find out more about those circumstances before we can decide if you're qualified for benefits. All reasons other than lack of work (layoffs) will trigger adjudication. (These include getting fired, quitting, taking a leave of absence and or being involved in a labor dispute.) There are a number of eligibility factors that will also trigger adjudication.
If my application goes to adjudication, does that mean I've been denied unemployment benefits?No. If your case goes to adjudication, it means there are questions or issues that must be addressed before your claim can be cleared for payment or denied. We temporarily suspend your claim until we resolve those issues by obtaining information from you and/or your employers and by seeking additional information to clear up any conflicting or missing information. Issues often include the reason or circumstances that led to your job loss.
No. If your case goes to adjudication, it means there are questions or issues that must be addressed before your claim can be cleared for payment or denied. We temporarily suspend your claim until we resolve those issues by obtaining information from you and/or your employers and by seeking additional information to clear up any conflicting or missing information. Issues often include the reason or circumstances that led to your job loss.
And therein lies the difference between PINs and passwords: local authentication vs. remote authentication. You use a PIN to unlock your device, but you rarely use a password to do that. PINs are largely shorter than passwords (usually 4-6 characters compared to eight-plus), though it's possible to make it longer, if you wish.
The key is to understand what you're doing: one decrypts a device or authenticates you to a local system, while the other is to authenticate through a remote IdP service. The threat model for the device means that a shorter, less complex PIN is fine, while the remote server means that you want more complexity. (But again, you want more than just a password anyway!)
Most smartphones have users create a PIN (alongside biometrics, if capable) to unlock their devices. The shorter length does make your PIN easier to crack than a password due to the more limited combination options (most use numbers, though with Windows Hello it can be any characters). At first glance, this makes PINs appear to be inherently less secure due to their shorter length and thus fewer combination possibilities (when restricted to numbers, that is). But that isn't as big an issue given that the PIN remains local, which means attackers need physical access to your device. Additionally, most devices limit the amount of times one can guess your PIN before an action is taken, reducing the effectiveness of a brute force attack.
Part of what drew me into this topic was due to how vendors market their solutions as "passwordless," but still allowed for a memorized secret (aka a PIN) as one authentication option. It created needless confusion in me; so, once again, a thank you" to marketers for making everyone's life just a little more difficult.
DataGenetics discovered that the combination 2580 was the 22nd-most-popular PIN (most likely because those four numbers appear in a single column from top to bottom on a phone or ATM keypad), that people prefer even numbers to odd (2468 ranks higher than 1357), and that far more passwords start with 1 than any other number.
Verifiers SHALL store memorized secrets in a form that is resistant to offline attacks. Memorized secrets SHALL be salted and hashed using a suitable one-way key derivation function. Key derivation functions take a password, a salt, and a cost factor as inputs then generate a password hash. Their purpose is to make each password guessing trial by an attacker who has obtained a password hash file expensive and therefore the cost of a guessing attack high or prohibitive. Examples of suitable key derivation functions include Password-based Key Derivation Function 2 (PBKDF2) [SP 800-132] and Balloon [BALLOON]. A memory-hard function SHOULD be used because it increases the cost of an attack. The key derivation function SHALL use an approved one-way function such as Keyed Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) [FIPS 198-1], any approved hash function in SP 800-107, Secure Hash Algorithm 3 (SHA-3) [FIPS 202], CMAC [SP 800-38B] or Keccak Message Authentication Code (KMAC), Customizable SHAKE (cSHAKE), or ParallelHash [SP 800-185]. The chosen output length of the key derivation function SHOULD be the same as the length of the underlying one-way function output.
For PBKDF2, the cost factor is an iteration count: the more times the PBKDF2 function is iterated, the longer it takes to compute the password hash. Therefore, the iteration count SHOULD be as large as verification server performance will allow, typically at least 10,000 iterations.
The weak point in many authentication mechanisms is the process followed when a subscriber loses control of one or more authenticators and needs to replace them. In many cases, the options remaining available to authenticate the subscriber are limited, and economic concerns (e.g., cost of maintaining call centers) motivate the use of inexpensive, and often less secure, backup authentication methods. To the extent that authenticator recovery is human-assisted, there is also the risk of social engineering attacks.
CSPs should be able to reasonably justify any response they take to identified privacy risks, including accepting the risk, mitigating the risk, and sharing the risk. The use of subscriber consent is a form of sharing the risk, and therefore appropriate for use only when a subscriber could reasonably be expected to have the capacity to assess and accept the shared risk.
CSPs may have various business purposes for processing attributes, including providing non-identity services to subscribers. However, processing attributes for other purposes than those specified at collection can create privacy risks when individuals are not expecting or comfortable with the additional processing. CSPs can determine appropriate measures commensurate with the privacy risk arising from the additional processing. For example, absent applicable law, regulation or policy, it may not be necessary to get consent when processing attributes to provide non-identity services requested by subscribers, although notices may help subscribers maintain reliable assumptions about the processing (predictability). Other processing of attributes may carry different privacy risks that call for obtaining consent or allowing subscribers more control over the use or disclosure of specific attributes (manageability). Subscriber consent needs to be meaningful; therefore, as stated in Section 4.4, when CSPs use consent measures, acceptance by the subscriber of additional uses SHALL NOT be a condition of providing authentication services.
Complexity of user-chosen passwords has often been characterized using the information theory concept of entropy [Shannon]. While entropy can be readily calculated for data having deterministic distribution functions, estimating the entropy for user-chosen passwords is difficult and past efforts to do so have not been particularly accurate. For this reason, a different and somewhat simpler approach, based primarily on password length, is presented herein.
The minimum password length that should be required depends to a large extent on the threat model being addressed. Online attacks where the attacker attempts to log in by guessing the password can be mitigated by limiting the rate of login attempts permitted. In order to prevent an attacker (or a persistent claimant with poor typing skills) from easily inflicting a denial-of-service attack on the subscriber by making many incorrect guesses, passwords need to be complex enough that rate limiting does not occur after a modest number of erroneous attempts, but does occur before there is a significant chance of a successful guess.
Users should be encouraged to make their passwords as lengthy as they want, within reason. Since the size of a hashed password is independent of its length, there is no reason not to permit the use of lengthy passwords (or pass phrases) if the user wishes. Extremely long passwords (perhaps megabytes in length) could conceivably require excessive processing time to hash, so it is reasonable to have some limit. 2ff7e9595c
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