Did you factor this?
Erik Boemanns
Derisking technology with a lawyer's lens and a technologist's techniques. Governance, Risk, Compliance, and Security Executive supporting businesses focused on their next stage of growth.
Cybersecurity awareness is not always just about what you need to watch out for but also what you can do to be more secure. Cyber hygiene helps make you more resilient and helps prevent attacks before they happen. Most of the CISA’s Secure Our World campaign is focused on prevention and good hygiene. This week, we dive into multifactor authentication (or MFA).
The short message? If it’s available, turn it on.
What is MFA and why does it help?
When we talk about authentication, we’re talking about you proving your identity when accessing a service. Are you who you claim to be? Or is someone trying to impersonate you? In the earliest days of shared computing (think 1960s), the way you proved yourself was via a password. You’d type in your username – which everyone would recognize – and then your password, which only you should know. By knowing a secret (your password) you could prove your authenticity. A small aside, passwords weren’t particularly good security, as for many decades, they weren’t encrypted. So, anyone with the right permission could see everyone’s password.
Even in this century, password databases were often not properly protected. As they were stolen by hacking groups, your password would become public information (to the dark web). If you used the same username and password on many different sites – then the bad guys had access to your entire digital life. Security began to depend on something beyond a password, something someone couldn’t steal from you without you knowing they’d done so.
A common answer was a security token. In most cases, this was a small device with a rotating set of numbers. You could put it on your key chain, and through the magic of encryption, the numbers it displayed were unique at that moment in time to your device. When you needed to access a resource, you’d type the number displayed into the computer, and if it matched, you’d be allowed in. And, since it was a physical object, if someone stole it, you’d be able to report it and have it disabled.
But you couldn’t trust the token alone. If it were stolen, there still needed to be a way to keep people out of the system. So, your password was still required. You have to enter two types of information – your password and your token’s number. This was appropriately called two-factor authentication (or 2FA) and was the precursor to MFA. What’s the difference between 2FA and MFA you might wonder? MFA provides the opportunity for flexibility and even more security than 2FA.
The “factors” we keep mentioning are ways you can prove your identity to a system. In classic authentication, there are three factors.
The “something you know” is your password, your PIN, or any of those “security questions” which ask about your first car or favorite pet’s name. The “something you have” refers to a real-world item you have in your possession. The security tokens mentioned before count, as does your phone, laptop, smart card, and many other technologies. Finally, “something you are” refers to biometrics. Our fingerprints, faces, voices, retinas, irises, and any other ways computers and phones now can recognize us without entering a PIN or password are all part of this factor.
To have multifactor authentication, you have to pick from at least two of the three categories to access the system. So, multiple examples of the same factor don’t count as MFA. For example, some websites ask for your password and for your security questions. This isn’t MFA, as they’re both from the “something you know” category. Similarly, signing in with a token and an SMS message on your phone would just be two forms of “something you have.”
MFA expands on 2FA because you can have more than 2 factors as well. Do you have to unlock your phone with your fingerprint before you can approve an authenticator request? That’s two different factors on your phone – and not counting the password you also typed into the website. All three classic factors are needed in this scenario. Modern MFA leverages the biometric and encryption capabilities of our smartphones to help cover the “something you have” and “something you are” factors from one piece of hardware.
Why do I keep referring to the “classic factors”?
Because modern authentication goes beyond those three to include other factors as well. The most common is “somewhere you are” – once again leveraging the capabilities of your phone. Since the modern phone tracks all our movement, it has a pretty good idea if we’re somewhere which makes sense for us to be. If someone starts accessing our account from a different location, it will raise alarms and block access (or require even more factors to be used).
Our local and online behavior also creates a digital fingerprint of our identity. What websites we go to, how we interact with the devices, all can be monitored by websites. In doing so they can recognize when it’s likely us trying to access them or if someone has stolen our information and is trying to impersonate us. This “how you behave” factor is just another data point in the modern world trying to make sure we really are who we claim to be.
Overall, MFA technologies make your online world safer. By requiring more than a username and password to access a system, it’s very hard for someone to steal enough to impersonate you. Modern companies have even shifted their MFA approach to allow a simpler experience without sacrificing security. By leveraging the full modern factors, a site may be using MFA without making you get a text message or using an authenticator app on your phone. But, when they do, they’re at least making it obvious to you and attackers that they have MFA in place.
In the future, MFA will almost certainly get rid of the “something you know” factor. It’s the least secure and the most difficult for end-users. Leveraging the other 4 factors we discussed (plus more we didn’t) will allow future devices to seamlessly authenticate us without all the hassle we face today. There will be some interesting privacy questions to answer along the way, as privacy and identity are intrinsically linked subjects. But we’ll leave this exploration for another time.
Till next time, stay cybersafe and make sure your using MFA everywhere you can!
Upcoming Event
I'm speaking this Thursday (October 24th) at ISSA Metro Atlanta's monthly meeting.
Topic: Identity Matters (All about identity management, MFA, single-sign-on and more!)
Register here and join in person (in Atlanta) or via Zoom!
Is your Cybersecurity Awareness Program Fun?
In my latest contribution to The National CIO Review® I discuss the key message of CISA's Secure Our World campaign, but also include some fun lessons you can incorporate to make the month mor meaningful. There's still 11 days - so plenty of time to give some of them a try!
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Week In Review
This past week has been all about cybersecurity. You've enjoyed the polls as well, and it's interesting to see all the opinions on these important topics.
Here's what was covered:
If you missed any of them, there's still time to join in the conversation, vote in the poll, and share your own thoughts!
In Conclusion
We're wrapping up our MFA topics and end the month with updating software. Be sure to stay tuned for the Halloween bonus post!
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About Erik
Erik Boemanns is a technology executive and lawyer. His background covers many aspects of technology, from infrastructure to software development. He combines this with a "second career" as a lawyer into a world of cybersecurity, governance, risk, compliance, and privacy (GRC-P). His time in a variety of companies, industries, and careers brings a unique perspective on leadership, helping, technology problem solving and implementing compliance.
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