In today’s complex environment, employees have access to corporate networks and are authenticated to corporate systems, as well as servers, and devices. It is dire if a malicious attacker gets the same access either through brute force or by taking advantage of the staff that lack awareness to gain the same level of access privileges, this escalates their ability to move laterally throughout the enterprise.

It is for this reason that organizations enforce policies over strong user credentials, multiple methods for authentication, password management tools, and a strong cybersecurity program.

Notably, organizations have to acknowledge identity governance, assess all possible risks around user authentication and access controls, put in place Identity governance solutions carry out Business Impact Analysis to understand key critical systems in the organization’s inventory, analyse and understand access privileges granted to employees, contractors, and partners.

Why Authentication process needs a keen eye?

One of the most important aspects of a system or network authentication is the focus on the user and human-to-computer interactions. This makes user authentication crucial to understand when creating or improving your corporate systems’ login procedure.

Whether you’re looking to amp up your internal security, increase security over system access, or simply provide a better user experience for employees and individuals exploring your corporate systems and internet-facing applications, it’s important to know how user authentication fits into the equation.

What is Authentication?

Authentication is a security process that began long before the age of computing. Only in our current parlance, does it seem linked to our digital security.

It is a security process that covers all of the human-to-computer interactions that require the user to register and log in to verify their identity to the web application. That is to say, authentication asks each user that tries to access the system or corporate network, “who are you?” and verifies the response of the user.

When employees or users register accounts, they create unique IDs and keys that allow them to access their accounts later on. Generally, a username and password are used as the ID and key, but the credentials can include other forms of keys as well (see our section on types of user authentication).

The authentication process provides users with repeat access to their accounts while attempting to block unauthenticated and malicious users from gaining access.

Factors of Authentication

Three factors can provide a form of authentication:

1. What You Know
   Factors the user must know to log in are considered knowledge factors. This can be anything from a username, password, or PIN. The challenge with these factors is that they can be weak in terms of security because they can be shared or guessed.
2. What You Have
   Anything that the user must have or possess to log in. One-time password tokens such as smart cards, ID cards, and physical tokens are all considered as what a user possesses.
3. What You Are
   This is tailored to a person’s biological characteristics. Any biometric authentication process, such as fingerprint scanning and facial recognition, would fall into this category.

Multi-factor Authentication:

Combining factors of authentication greatly reduces the chance of failure in the authentication process.

Two and three-factor authentication are catching on in many areas outside of internet services. In many cases, three are required in the form of having an access card, combined with an authorized fingerprint, and finally one must know a lock combination to gain access to their computing equipment.

Multi-factor authentication will continue to become more common for security procedures of various internet services. Many prominent internet services have already implemented them. Facebook, Twitter, and Google services already support two-factor authentication.

Conclusion

To this end that you understand how authentication works and how users authenticate their identities into various corporate systems. Organizations need to ensure the following to make their login process more secure, user-friendly, or a combination of both;

Encourage Stronger Passwords to Improve Security.

Passwords alone aren’t the best authentication method because of the various vulnerabilities they bring due to insecure user-generated credentials. However, organizations should improve the existing password-based authentication system. It should implement a password policy to encourage users to create better passwords.

Some of the hints to follow to create stronger passwords are;

1. Longer passwords are more secure. Security experts suggest that you create passwords with a minimum of 8 characters. But we recommend that you create passwords closer to 12 characters in length.
2. Passwords should have a mix of characters. Passwords with a random combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols are harder to crack.
3. Users should avoid using formulas when generating passwords. The patterns and formulas make it easy for hackers to guess passwords and offer users a false sense of security.