In today’s day and life a lot of emphasis is put on securing the content that we access on the web but, with each of us having numerous accounts it becomes tedious to remember that many passwords. Also there is this constant threat of some one hacking into your account and viewing or even misusing your personal data. There are a number of different methods that attackers use to try to obtain your password. The most common methods are: phissing,guessing,cracking,keylogging.
In the latest post on the Windows 8 developer’s blog site, Microsoft’s Dustin Ingalls, who is a group program manager on the Windows 8 security and identity team, has explained this in more detail.
One big issue with securing your personal identity details on the Internet is the use of passwords.Ingalls says,” The number of unique passwords across those 25 accounts is only about 6. For folks who spend time thinking about security, that’s a worrisome finding as it shows that the average person reuses the same password quite frequently across accounts.”
To counter this situation Ingalls states,
Windows 8 simplifies the task of managing unique and complex passwords in two important ways. The first is by providing a way to automatically store and retrieve multiple account names and passwords for all the websites and applications you use, and do so in a protected manner. Internet Explorer 10 uses the credentials that we store to remember names and passwords for websites you visit (if you choose). In addition, anyone building a Metro style app can use a direct API to securely store and retrieve credentials for that app.
The second important investment in this area was covered in an earlier post by Katie Frigon, Signing into Windows 8 with a Windows Live ID. One of the great things you get when you sign in to Windows with your Windows Live ID is the ability to sync the credentials you’ve stored to all of the Windows 8 PCs that you register as your “Trusted PCs.”
Windows 8 has a number of new features that make it much easier for both users and application developers to make use of public/private key methods. Windows already provides fairly extensive support for use of key pairs and certificates; but strong protection of the private key, as I mentioned earlier, typically relied on HSMs or smart cards.Windows 8 includes a new Key Storage Provider (KSP), which provides easy, convenient use of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as a way of strongly protecting private keys. A TPM is a trusted execution environment found on many business-class PCs today (and we expect much broader availability of TPMs when Windows 8 ships), which enables a PC to securely store cryptographic keys. Metro-style apps have APIs that make it easy to automatically enroll and manage keys on your behalf.
He finally concludes by saying, “In a world that is becoming increasingly dependent on maintaining a secure digital identity, we are very passionate about finding ways to make your digital life safer and more secure, without making it more complex.”
