Winegar Willis Thomas

Abstract Reference: 31641
Identifier: P4.19
Presentation: Poster presentation
Key Theme: 4 Long-term Management of Data Archives

Beyond the Login: Transactional Randomized Authentication for Data Download

Authors:
Thomas Willis Winegar

For data management within the Subaru Telescope Archive, observers consistently report failure to remember personalized logins and personalized passwords. We have numerous examples of users with one password for all their user accounts from social media and commercial internet memberships through private observatory-network passwords, users with all their logins and password written inside public email mailboxes, users with pieces of paper in their wallet or on their desk or computer. The Subaru Telescope started providing higher-security randomized logins and passwords for data-download, resulting in a substantial percentage of users preferring transaction-unique randomized-authentication versus traditional user-unique authentication for data download. By using long strings of random characters for each download-authentication, we can better protect the privacy of both the user and our data: remove the incentive for insecure storage of authentication details and decrease authentication failures due to human error. We intend to extend this idea using a predicted and progressive system of randomized logins and passwords that automatically advance to a new authentication-pair with each new download.