DARPA’s Active Authentication program has initially been aimed at developing tools designed to protect desktop workstations. The program is entering its second phase, in which the agency is calling for research that sets out to establish behavioural biometrics based on discernible cognitive processes and the observable ways that users naturally interact with their environment while using their computing devices. The Active Authentication program will also need to develop what DARPA is calling a “biometric platform,” that integrates all available biometrics into a single device that carries out the actual business of authentication.
The FIDO Alliance on the other hand is interested in establishing a standard of interoperable authentication schemes. Theirs isn’t a single technological solution but an open protocol that can absorb new authentication technologies into a single infrastructure where they can work in concert with existing technologies such as USB tokens, one time passwords and near field communications among others.
Other password-free authentication propositions have included everything from biometric identifiers to the creation of specialized software capable of reading microscopic and uncontrollable markings left upon graphics processors during the manufacturing process.
The FIDO Alliance was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among authentication technologies and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords.
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