Forums Community Two factor authentication Reply To: Two factor authentication

#4076 Reply

Svante
Spectator

Hello Dirk,

Thank you for your input. I’ll be writing a longer text on Authentication vs. Encryption, but very briefly. Authentication is about proving to a system that you are who you claim to be, i.e. to provide evidence to support the claim. In the physical world, this might be a passport for example. Encryption is not really about proving anything, it’s about either knowing or not knowing an encryption key. Either you know it, or you don’t. Two-factor authentication is about providing stronger evidence to support your identity claim. With encryption, that doesn’t make sense, because there is no identity claim involved, it’s just about either posessing or not posessing the decryption key.

All that being said, we’re thinking about the possibility of some hybrid system if we can figure something out that makes sense both from a security point of view, and from a user point of view. Our main issue here is that we’d like to keep AxCrypt to be about *real* security, not *perceived* . I.e. we don’t want to add features that many users believes increases security, while in fact it does not.

A timeout for the sign in is in the works, by popular demand. You can follow it here: https://bitbucket.org/axantum/axcrypt-net/issues/208/sign-out-automatically-on-a-set-time .

Once again – thank you!