The so-called 1-factor authentication is not enough these days as it’s vulnerable to leaks and is often hacked.

That's why multi-factor authentication (MFA) is absolutely vital to protect your most important accounts. The most popular form of multi-factor authentication is the two factor authentication, also known as 2FA.

Multi-factor authentication is an authentication process that requires at least two pieces of different information from you. There are three factors:

Knowledge factor

The knowledge factor is what most people are familiar with. Some examples of knowledge factors include passwords, patterns and PIN. The knowledge factor is almost always used as a factor in the authentication of multiple factors.

Possession factor

The possession factor means something you have. Nowadays this is usually done with an application on your smartphone, but in businesses, this is usually replaced by something like a smart card.

Biometric factor

The biometric factor is something that you are. This is the newest factor and does not have a very broad user base, but it is slowly gaining popularity. Biometric factors include the use of face recognition, fingerprint scans and speech recognition.

Not all 2FAs are the same

While 2FA is safe in general, the methods in each factor are safer than others. This is mainly the SMS 2FA. SMS 2FA is no longer secure and may lead to your account being compromised. If someone is determined to enter your account, intercepting an SMS is not impossible.

Using a dedicated application or a physical device is the best option when it comes to 2FA, if a service is not offering this, your best option is to avoid that service.

The future of multi-factor authentication

The biometrics will become a much more used factor in MFA, this is mainly due to the improvement in the technologies surrounding the recognition of patterns, as well as the ability to reduce this hardware to small phones.

Apple, Samsung and Google all have fingerprint scanners on their phones, just to name a few. Apple has gone so far as to include a face recognition feature on the brand new iPhone X. This implementation has shown that biometric data is not always the safest since the ID face had been fooled by a face printed in 3D.

Many people also do not feel comfortable with their biometric data being stored online, but it seems to be becoming less viable over time.

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