Today we're talking multi-factor authentication, also known as two-factor authentication, and 2-step verification. It's got a few names but what is it?
Well, essentially it's proving your identity in more than one way. The principle being that if one of these authentication factors is defeated, that's not enough to give access to your data. So your data should be secure if someone steals your password for example. It's not enough to just log in twice. These different authentication factors have to work in a fundamentally different way. So you can't just use a second password or a password in a pin; because passwords and pins both rely on the same thing - your memory. So if they have to work in different ways, what different factors are available for us to use? Well, here are some of the common ones.