PayPal, Lenovo Launch New Campaign to Kill the Password

A consortium including PayPal and Lenovo, the world’s second-largest PC manufacturer, has launched a set of technology standards that could reduce reliance on passwords, potentially making online accounts more secure.

Under the standards put forward by the FIDO Alliance, the device a person is using to log in to an account would play a more central role in authentication. That would make it impossible to compromise accounts by stealing passwords, as hackers did in order to break into Twitter this month and LinkedIn last year.

“Customers credentials are [today] easily retrievable by criminals by techniques such as password guessing, credential theft at websites or phishing,” says Michael Barrett, chief information security officer at PayPal and a cofounder of the FIDO Alliance, “FIDO is significant because it helps to move us into a world where credentials are much more bound to the device and it’s much harder for the criminal to abscond with them.”