OneID Aims to Unite Devices to Fight Hackers

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Just came across this article in the Technology section of the NY Times: OneID Aims to Unite Devices to Fight Hackers - NYTimes.com. Here's the lead in
Assume your computer, your cellphone and your iPad are all insecure, subject to hackers. All three of them working together to protect your information — would that be better?

Steve Kirsch, the founder of OneID, in 2007.
It would, according to OneID, a start-up company in San Jose, Calif., that is trying to promote a new kind of “single sign-on” security for the Web.

Single sign-on is a kind of holy grail on the Internet, a way of avoiding having to remember separate passwords for every Web site and service a person uses. Like the original grail, lots of people have believed in it and no one has found it. In this case, Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems and long-forgotten companies like Oblix (now part of Oracle) have all tried.

Frequently the technology behind one company or another’s single sign-on is plausible, but everyone else on the Internet is not comfortable turning their customers’ identities over to one big player. Facebook might want to be the one-stop identity company, too, but would face distrust. This may leave an opening for a smaller company with sufficient financing and a novel technology.

Enter OneID, founded by Steve Kirsch, a well-known Silicon Valley multimillionaire who founded, among other companies, the search engine Infoseek. His technology confirms who you are by combining the private security “keys” of several devices, which are then encrypted in a “blob” in a remote data center. Supposedly your personal information, including your name and address, passwords and credit card data, cannot be obtained there, either. When you want to log on to a Web site, OneID checks the security of the site, then determines who you are by confirming three different digital signatures on different devices. Merchants never see your credit card information but receive a clearance from OneID...

What do you think?

I knew we had a somewhat related thread...in the sense of passwords and rediscovered it here: https://www.photographerslounge.org/f16/passwords-mac-2179/ I like the idea of OneID. I don't use my laptop in public...though that's not completely true as I have used it in hotels from time to time. If I were needing to use any portable device that had important personal/business information in a wifi hotspot, I don't think I'd like the idea that someone like Lisbeth Salander or her friend Plague (for those who have read the trilogy by Stieg Larson) "hacking" their way into my files...though, honestly, it's probably more likely that someone will hack into my bank's computer system than my own.

Anyhow, I thought I'd bring the article to your attention, in case you'd find it interesting.
 
I have to say, the idea that my security would depend on a "blob" in a "remote data center" owned by a "silicon valley multimillionaire" doesn't fill me with unalloyed enthusiasm :)
 
Well, Paul, I know that choice of words was pretty funny but I'm guessing it's to avoid the "cloud" analogy.;)

P.S. I'm not preaching this as the answer but did think it was interesting. I still use pens and paper.:eek:
 
stick to pens and paper
(iin a previous incarnation, i was a designer of electronic messaging systems and e-security consultant)
 
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