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Jamie
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Single Sign On

by Simon Biles

Calling something a “Holy Grail” is an interesting term – the intended meaning is well known to most of us – i.e. something miraculous that will solve all of your problems. However given that it’s supposedly a cup, bowl or dish hardly links it sensibly to password management – none the less, Single-Sign-On ( henceforth in this article as SSO to save me from RSI ) is supposedly the “Holy Grail” of Authentication.

SSO is the answer to the dilemma that we were left with at the end of the last article – we want complex passwords, difficult to break ones, that change often, on all the systems that a user has access to … A rather entertaining (if a little dated now) paper from Microsoft tells us that each user has 25 accounts that require passwords, and types, on average, 8 passwords a day – and this is a paper about web-browsing habits, not including primary logons to machines or other work legacy systems. What is more interesting is that each user, on average, has 4.5 passwords each used on 3.9 websites (I love averages – how else can you have ½ a password and .9 of a website !). Looking through some other literature suggests that some people manage way, way more than this – with this particular user dealing with 97 separate and distinct password protected systems…

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Please use this thread for discussion of Simon's latest column.


   
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