Exciting Research Directions in User Authentication Online

While we haven't been able to quite kill the password (yet), there have been many advancements in both the type of technology that people routinely use and the penetration of that technology into new areas of the world. For example, while several years ago few users wore computers on their body, now many people have fitness bands with long life times and biometric sensors. In fact, biometrics themselves used to require non-standard hardware, but now almost every new smartphone has a fingerprint reader. While previously the Internet was limited to only first-world and second-world countries, it is now starting to heavily penetrate areas of the world which have never heard of passwords and have a different mindset around authentication altogether. Finally, in a recent trend, websites began to accept phone numbers as user identifiers instead of e-mail addresses. What does all of this mean for privacy, for security, for anonymity, and what type of research opportunities arise? Let's discuss all of this and more.