Why Passwordless Customer Authentication Should Be a Priority for CISOs

What is a passwordless approach to customer authentication?

The concept has existed for many years, but the computing infrastructure behind eliminating passwords just wasn't there for supporting any true mass-market consumer adoption. Previous identity solutions were developed using chip-based smartcards, hardware dongles, and so forth, but none of them were practical for helping secure connections with consumers due to physical distribution issues and the orders-of-magnitude greater scale of consumer-focused applications and services.

Requiring any sort of password creation activity for a consumer-facing application is just a bad idea. As consumers, we make up passwords on a whim and don't typically remember them past the current session. Most of the industry rhetoric on passwordless seems to completely miss this point. Consumers want, and will soon insist on, registered devices on which they can access web application services with the touch of a finger or a glance at a screen. Consumers also won't tolerate a proprietary solution that works for only one or two situations.