Altcoins News

Story: Single Sign On With Ethereum (ETH) Is the Future of Internet App Log in

By James Thorp

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Twitter Handle Brantly.ETH expresses, The Ethereum community has accidentally solved a major problem of the Internet: Single Sign-On "Sign-In w/ Ethereum" is the future of login…

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First, what is "Single Sign-On"? It can mean different things depending on context, but here I mean: An average person having one username and password/authentication method that…

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The Internet has no personal username/authentication system, built-in IP addresses change and are based on device/location, and DNS was never really meant to be a personal…

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We all know what happened – people are re-using weak passwords written on post-it notes - signup fatigue ("I have to create another username /password ?") - hacks + data dumps.

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Yes, people can use password managers etc, but this doesn't happen in practice.

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One solution in the last decade has been Social Sign-On. You probably already have an account with Google, Facebook, etc, so why not just sign-in with that to new services?

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While an improvement, “Social Sign-On” has a few problems 1) It depends on a few big corps.  Do users really want Google to control their user name /pass word for the whole…

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2) It's inherently fragmented - username /password controlled by a Big Corp can never be "neutral" - "which social account did I use for this service again?

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3) People still have weak passwords.  If you're signing into everything with your Google account, your security for everything now depends on the strength of your Google…

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Ethereum Sign-In is a new paradigm. First, Ethereum is giving average people computer generated public/private key pairs with systems in place to securely connect them to…

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Your Ethereum private key is your super secure password that you control. No central service required to make it work. Just sign something w/ your private key.

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Ppl need good UIs for storing/using their private key. This was the Achilles heel of cypherpunks/PGP This is another thing crypto incentives are improving - hardware wallets –…

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Second, you need human-readable username Key pairs, which can be computer generated, but don't usernames require a central service to store this info?

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Blockchains solved this Trilemma. Namecoin (launched in 2011) was the first attempt at this, but never got adoption But ENS Domains, launched in 2017 and built with…

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Users can register a .ETH name on ENS without touching a single centralized service and then hold custody of it themselves with their Ethereum account.

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