Technology

Don't come to Korea. Every banking transaction requires you to punch in your PIN at least twice with a randomized numpad. Well actually it's a 4x3 numpad with 2 spaces randomly inserted into it.

I'm sure there's an answer there, and i'd really like to know what it is.

I've encountered this in two places. One was way back in the day on Runescape where they shuffled the keys after every press. The other was much more recently with a bank that had them shuffled randomly on page load, but not moving between key presses. Annoyingly, this bank allowed only logging on to their web service via a 4-digit PIN—not any sort of real password/passphrase.

The biggest potential issue is if your local password can be used to login remotely.

I am definitely coming to the conclusion that in the long run, we're going to end up using something that looks a fair bit like Webauthn / Passkeys for most things that care about security, with something as additional local authentication.

There are technical reasons why passwords / passphrases are useful, but there is a lot of research that shows just how horrible they are both from a security perspective and from a usability perspective.

Biometrics are... Convenient, but only useful in low security applications*, and are almost impossible to use for things like unlocking your phone after it reboots**.

A separate physical object would work really well in some cases, like a desktop computer, but it wouldn't work at all for something like your cell phone. Or even a laptop. The object would be stolen along with the device it secures.

I'm really not sure what the long term answer even looks like, but I do hope that it's not passwords or the like.

*: You can't easily change any of your biometrics, but you can most definitely capture someone's biometrics, and then duplicate them to gain access to something. It wouldn't be practical to do this every single day, but just to gain access to something once or twice? Easy enough.

**: The short version: Your PIN / Passphrase / Password / Pattern get fed into a hashing function of some sort, like PBKDF2, which eventually spits out something that can be used to decrypt the key used to encrypt all the data on the device. But this requires a static value, and biometrics are all about fuzzy matches to other patterns.

Ironically, the original Dvorak layout also did some really weird stuff to its numbers. Though these days, those of us who use Dvorak almost exclusively use the "Dvorak Simplified Keyboard", which keeps its top row the same as the US QWERTY layout (apart from the two symbol keys immediately left of backspace).

Yes it is! :)