Dashlane Project Mirror To Kill Passwords With A Password Manager

Next to humans themselves, passwords are the bane of digital security. Decades after they have been invented, humans still haven't learned their lesson, no matter how devastating some cases have been. Many still resort to the worst possible passwords. That frailty has, in a way, helped keep password managers like Dashlane in business. Ironically, Dashlane is now proposing to kill passwords. If that weren't enough of a head-scratcher, maybe this will be: it will start killing passwords by introducing a password manager.

Password managers like Dashlane, Lastpass, 1Pass, and the many more operate on two fronts. One is that they can generate secure, random passwords. The other is that they can store those passwords, even weak passwords you made yourself, so that you won't have to remember them yourself.

They are, however, still password-based and, therefore, still suffer from the same vulnerabilities as passwords. A few new technologies have popped up to replace passwords, like fingerprints, irises, and faces, but Dashlane isn't a believer of biometrics. So it wants to kill passwords in 2018, but it isn't exactly saying how it plans to do that.

In fact, it is only talking about Step One to password-free world domination. A step that eerily looks like what it's been doing all along: managing passwords. The difference is that this "Critical Account Protection" is all automated. Importing passwords, analyzing them, and resetting them to secure the accounts can all happen with as few taps as needed.

That still raises the question of what Dashlane has in mind to replace the password. It only says that Project Mirror, its nickname for "Project Kill the Password", will be like a mirror of your digital identity and that everything will be automated. Other than that, however, it mostly sounds like yet another password manager, except automated.

SOURCE: Dashlane