exploring software and hardware security

I decided to continue the series of “user authentication” related articles (which I started with article Conventional Website Authentication Model and its Weaknesses) and bring more details about one-time passwords.

In this article I will overview the following topics:

• Basic ideas behind OTP
• OTP Types
• Vulnerabilities
• Standards and Applications

To make the illustration of OTP more practical we will implement a web server with authentication from scratch by trying to integrate an OTP scheme.

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The current article discusses the problems of authentication schemes that are used by websites and browsers while the user logs in to a website.

The following topics will be covered:

• Conventional user and website authentication model
• Weak points of password based authentication
• Weak points of website authentication
• Alternative ways for user authentication in websites

Note that by the term “conventional” we mean the most popularly used authentication scheme – username/password.

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