Over the past five years, mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage across multiple dimensions. In 2020, 51% of time spent online in the U.S. is on a mobile device. Given this rapid shift to mobile, it’s worth taking a look at the brief history of digital authentication and evolution to meet the challenges of today’s mobile user. Two-factor authentication (2FA) has been particularly challenging to the user experience.
Digital authentication started with the computer password, an invention by Fernando Corbato in the 1960s, and it was sufficient in the early stages. Passwords were the logical starting point for internet security since they had been used as a method of authentication for centuries leading up to the computer. The earliest reference to passwords appeared back in ancient Mesopotamia. However, by the early 2000s the difficulties with passwords became apparent. In 2004 Bill Gates declared that passwords were inherently weak and could not be relied on going forward. By 2014 even Fernando Corbato himself admitted that passwords had become “kind of a nightmare.”