Authentication for Humans

摘要

To authenticate something in the Internet is to verify that its identity is as claimed. Unless the identity itself is meaningful and the user is presented with evidence to support the claim of identity there can be no authentication. Many efforts to implement authentication seem to forget this and only focus on the cryptographic authentication mechanisms. This paper describes what is needed in addition to cryptography for authentication to be meaningful to humans, and illustrates this by showing how it can be applied in the Web and WAP architectures.