Multi-factor authentication (MFA) has become the authentication standard for nearly all types of businesses - from banks to bicycle rentals and everything in between. Yet, like so many security schemes, the more prevalent MFA becomes, the potentially less secure it also becomes.
Today, MFA is increasingly under attack, begging the question: Has MFA had its day? Is it time to adopt a more secure login scheme or is MFA still viable?
2FA and MFA: A Brief History
The predecessor of MFA, two-factor authentication (2FA), has been around - believe it or not - since 1986, when RSA introduced its first password-generating key fob. Throughout the 1990s, it found mostly niche use. Even in the first decade or so of the new millennium, only a limited number of security-conscious organizations used 2FA schemes - usually based on RSA public-key cryptography that used two separate authentication tokens to validate user logins.
