Passwords are among the most persistent inventions of the digital age. Created as a simple authentication mechanism, they have survived for more than six decades as the main key to accessing digital systems. However, in a landscape of sophisticated cyber threats, advanced social engineering, and underground credential markets, they have ceased to be a solution and have become a problem. What is at stake is not only ease of use, but the very concept of digital trust. It can be argued that the future of security requires the definitive overcoming of passwords, replacing them with mechanisms that are more robust, continuous, and resilient.
Trust cannot be treated as a naïve act, but as a construction sustained by evidence and verification. In the digital universe, it depends on three central elements: the ability to verify identity unequivocally, the guarantee that communication will not be corrupted or intercepted, and the elimination of any ambiguity in validating who interacts with the system. For decades, it was believed that a memorized password could fulfill this role. But contemporary reality—marked by mass leaks and highly sophisticated and automated attacks—has made it clear that this premise does not hold.
It is curious to note that passwords were born in an almost innocent context. In the early 1960s, at MIT, the use of personal secrets was introduced to differentiate users and allow the safe sharing of computing resources. The idea seemed elegant: it was enough to associate each identity with a sequence of characters known only to the user and the computer. From that point on, the practice expanded to corporate systems, bank accounts, email services, social networks, and cloud environments. Passwords became so present that they became part of digital culture, seen almost as an inevitable rite of access.
This habit, however, proved fragile. The problem begins with the human factor: in general, users create simple, easy-to-guess passwords often reused across multiple services. When they try to be more creative, they end up writing down complex combinations in insecure places, such as notebooks left on desks, papers, or spreadsheets. In addition, social engineering has become a powerful weapon to circumvent any technical sophistication, leading people to voluntarily hand over their credentials in phishing scams or fake support contacts. Automation has further amplified the risk, with brute-force and dictionary attacks capable of testing millions of combinations in seconds. To make matters worse, the explosion of data leaks has turned passwords into commodities available in underground markets, sold at derisory prices to anyone wishing to exploit them.
The herald of the death of passwords gains even more strength when we observe the advance of quantum computing. If today we already live with tools capable of testing millions of combinations in a matter of seconds, the prospect of quantum processors applied to breaking traditional algorithms raises the risk to a new level. Codes that once took days, weeks, or even months to decipher in classical environments could be reduced to mere seconds in a quantum scenario. This change threatens not only individual passwords, but the entire cryptographic model that underpins contemporary digital security. In this context, insisting on the password as the main protection barrier is to bet on a technology whose expiration date is already marked.
This makes it clear that passwords have ceased to be a protection mechanism and have become a risk vector. Even so, they persist due to technological and cultural inertia. But this scenario is beginning to change. The elimination of passwords has ceased to be a distant aspiration and has become a possible reality with the adoption of new technologies. Among the most promising alternatives are biometrics, already present in mobile devices and banking systems; the FIDO2 and WebAuthn standards, which allow smartphones and physical keys to be transformed into secure credentials, completely dispensing with memorized secrets; and single sign-on solutions, which centralize authentication into robust and reliable digital identities, reducing the attack surface and simplifying the user experience.
With the right technological resources in the hands of users today, it is possible to guarantee access without the use of passwords, implementing alternative authentication techniques. Current studies suggest considerations for integrating components during system development to ensure that users can access their accounts securely and with minimal complexity, while still meeting the requirements of a robust authentication system that balances security, usability, and performance.
Beyond these mechanisms, behavioral authentication is emerging as a field of innovation, analyzing patterns already well explored such as typing, browsing speed, user context, and even geographic location to continuously validate an individual's identity without requiring intervention. In parallel, temporary tokens and magic links sent via apps or push notifications offer practical and secure ways of access, without the need to memorize or type combinations. There is a constant effort to ensure security without creating friction with the end user, guaranteeing fluidity in the use of technology. In a way, passwords have always been this barrier, along with all the problems of their management, such as sharing or forgetting them.
The most important thing is to understand that these proposals do not compete with each other, but complement one another, forming an ecosystem in which security ceases to depend on human memory and instead relies on devices, biometric factors, and contextual signals. The user experience tends to become more fluid and intuitive, while resilience against attacks increases significantly.
Some say that passwords will not last more than 20 years; however, with such a long estimated life ahead, they still need to be worked on to ensure at least a minimum level of complexity so that attackers cannot easily exploit them and cause data breaches that damage the reputation of organizations. One of the proposals brought by USM researchers is to apply artificial intelligence to ensure that the passwords in use today will not be the attack vectors of tomorrow. In this way, users would be encouraged and required to use strong passwords, minimizing the risk of this scenario. However, without applications capable of securely storing passwords, the user once again becomes the main guardian of their storage. The results of this study show that training with machine learning models can improve password strength estimation by up to 20%.
Today, it is possible to see that the critical operations market is and will continue to be the true catalyst of this password elimination movement. Sectors such as finance, energy, telecommunications, and healthcare deal with data and systems whose unavailability can generate immediate impacts not only economic but also social. In this context, tolerance for risk becomes much lower, and the search for more robust and reliable authentication mechanisms is not just a trend but an urgent necessity. If in less critical areas it is still possible to delay the replacement of passwords due to inertia or fear of transition costs, in critical operations this delay is no longer acceptable.
What we observe is that, even if still timidly, these sectors are already driving the transformation. Financial institutions have begun mass adoption of biometric authentication, industrial systems are starting to integrate more robust standards into their architectures, and hospital environments, pressured by ransomware attacks, are seeking solutions that reduce dependence on traditional credentials. It is still a sluggish movement, no doubt, but the direction is clear: the greater the criticality of the service, the lower the patience with password weaknesses.
There is no other path to access protection. It is a mistake to imagine that incremental adjustments—such as forcing more complex passwords or requiring periodic changes—are capable of solving the problem. These measures, in addition to being ineffective, increase user frustration and ultimately encourage risky behaviors, such as writing passwords on paper or reusing combinations across multiple systems. True progress does not lie in creating stricter rules for passwords, but in eliminating the password from the equation.
The trend, therefore, is for critical operations to function as the "laboratory" of this transition. As these sectors demonstrate gains in security and efficiency, other segments will follow the same path, accelerating the adoption curve. It is the same phenomenon that occurred in previous moments of technological evolution: what is born as a necessity in high-criticality environments later consolidates as a standard for all.
Ultimately, this movement is not just about replacing one technology with another, but about redefining a standard. The password represents a security model centered on individual secrecy and the exclusive responsibility of the user. The world of critical operations demands something more solid, collective, and automated, in which trust is built on verifiable bases resistant to attacks. That is why I believe these sectors will be the first to definitively declare the end of passwords.
The future of authentication, therefore, will not be based on remembering something that can be easily copied, stolen, or forgotten. The path is to prove who we are in an unequivocal, continuous, and transparent way. If in the past the password was enough to sustain the pillars of digital trust, today it represents precisely its fragility. Breaking with this cultural dependency is an inevitable step toward building a safer environment in which trust is the product of robust technology and not the illusion of a poorly kept secret.
At the moment authentication ends, a new and equally complex journey begins: that of proper authorization and continuous monitoring of application use. This is a vast field, full of challenges that go beyond simple identity confirmation, requiring granular policies, intelligent surveillance mechanisms, and governance capable of balancing security and operational fluidity. This, however, is a topic that deserves a dedicated discussion and will be left for another moment.
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1 Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive (Bruce Schneier)
2 Passwords and the Evolution of Imperfect Authentication (Joseph Bonneau, Cormac Herley, Paul C. van Oorschot and Frank Stajano)
3 The Passwordless Authentication with Passkey Technology from an Implementation Perspective (Lien Tran, Boyuan Zhang, Ratchanon Pawanja, and Rashid Hussain Khokhar)
4 Challenges with Passwordless FIDO2 in an Enterprise Setting: A Usability Study (Michal Kepkowski, Maciej Machulak, Ian Wood and Dali Kaafar)
5 Adversarial Machine Learning for Robust Password Strength Estimation (Pappu Jha, Hanzla Hamid, Oluseyi Olukola, Ashim Dahal and Nick Rahimi)
