Digital Identity and Our Remembrance

Abstract

The text password, which is a section of the secret credentials, is known to be too hard to manage. Secret credentials are absolutely necessary for digital identity in democratic societies. We could look for something other than the text password as the valid secret credential. Three big myths are rampant in the sphere of digital identity. These are ‘Higher security achieved by removal of password’, ‘Passwords killed by the biometrics that is dependent on passwords’ and ‘Passwords displaced by PIN that is no more than a weak form of numbers-only password’. Unraveling these myths, we come to the conclusions that we must look for something really valid in the sphere of ‘Non-Text Password’ and that the identity of ‘citizens’ cannot be separated from their volition and memory while the identity of ‘things’ can be handled only technologically. Our own autobiographic memory, especially episodic memory, enables us to come up with the most reliable digital identity platform, bidding farewell to the unsafe and torturous identity proofing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hitoshi Kokumai

Hitoshi Kokumai Advocate of ‘Identity Assurance by Our Own Volition and Memory’ and Inventor of Expanded Password System that enables people to make use of episodic image memories for intuitive and secure identity authentication. He has kept raising the issue of wrong usage of biometrics and the false sense of security it brings for 17 years.

Mnemonic Security Inc. was founded in 2001 by Hitoshi Kokumai for promoting Expanded Password System. Following the pilot-scale operations in Japan, it is seeking to set up the global headquarters.

Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hitoshikokumai