However, I’m not talking about making hardware tokens more eco-friendly, although that may be a worthy pursuit. I’m suggesting that, in evaluating security technologies and methods, the security professional should include environmental impact as one of the factors to be considered.
Perhaps the security areas that have the most variety in terms of technologies are identification and authentication, so that may be a good place to begin.
In my article “The Demise of Passwords: Have Rumors Been Exaggerated?” in the May 2005 issue of The ISSA Journal, I wrote that I did (and still do) prefer the use of one-time passwords (OTPs). I particularly like the method in which the customer is furnished a card containing a table of characters to be used to make up the passwords. The central system transmits a series of x-y coordinates. The customer enters the characters in the table at the intersections of the coordinates. This “bingo card” is similar to a credit card in size and can in fact be designed to incorporate a site-entry swipe card, or other use, on the other side of the card. There aren’t any batteries to replace or circuits or displays. They last forever, if not compromised in some fashion. A card can easily be shared across systems and across institutions. Thus, they are relatively eco-friendly, certainly as compared to hardware tokens.
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I would suggest two things in response to your comments on OTP.
Firstly, the bingo style cards that you speak of are actually less secure than even passwords, as they operate within a much smaller set of finite values. Not to mention that a simple phishing attack would reveal the entire card for future use by any fraudster.
Secondly, newer, greener technologies such as OTP’s generated by software applications on mobile phones and invisible user authentication based on things like device profiling, geo-location, authentication velocity etc. are becoming more popular.
I do agree that greener alternatives need to be considered however I do not believe that bingo cards are the answer.