Summary
It has been a long chapter.
We started by observing how the value of the things we can do
with computers steadily rose through the last decades, culminating
in today??™s Web economy. We have studied attacks and motivations
behind the simpler, early crimes against property and
resources; we analyzed in some depth how vulnerable our data
is on the Internet, and came to understand the basic principles
of the arms race between cybercrime and countermeasures. We
have seen why protecting your identity online is important, and
we gave some measure of how brittle and broken today??™s practices
are.
We devoted an entire section to analyzing the merits and shortcomings
of passwords, understanding why they are the most
used authentication method today and why they are also perhaps
the worst kind of credentials we can ever use on the
Internet.
We started searching for viable alternatives among the credential
technologies currently available. Equipped with a solid understanding
of the cornerstones of cryptography, we learned the
difference between securing a communication and propagating
an identity. We took a look under the hood of HTTP, the protocol
that accounts for the vast majority of communications on the
Internet and discovered that it does not feature any speci?¬?c
place for plugging in authentication technologies.
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