These days, most online authentication procedures are a joke. Anyone can find your Social Security Number, mother’s maiden name, and any number of other personal details online. However, authenticating yourself while remaining anonymous is problematic: How are companies going to distinguish the fake anonymous you from the real one?

“Identity is this very interesting intersection of strong authentication, but at the same time real identities as well as anonymous identities,” said Jerrod Chong, vice president of solutions engineering at Yubico Inc. “And there are actually real-life applications for both that can protect citizens, can protect dissidents, but also at the same time can help governments to do the right things when they know who you are.”

Chong spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Data Privacy Day event in San Francisco, California. They discussed the current technology trends surrounding identity protection and privacy.

Want to hijack a phone? There’s an app for that …

It is evident that authentication procedures for secure log-in need to be stepped up. Previously secure measures, such as short message service codes are now easily breached, as learning how to hijack a phone is as easy as watching an online tutorial, according to Chong.

Knowledge-based security systems are a thing of the past, so Yubicon and Google have collaborated to create an open-source security solution that returns the power of identity back to the individual user. The YubiKey is a USB-based two-factor authentication tool that allows secure anonymous logins on multiple sites. By combining two of the three key ways to identify someone online — something you have and something you know — the device frees the user from remembering passwords and performing tedious log-in procedures.

But Google and Yubicon alone cannot solve the multiple challenges facing the community. Chong sees open-source collaboration as the only way to protect security and privacy, with the big three of Google, Apple and Microsoft needing to put aside competition and work together.

“We need to move away from all these one-up, proprietary things, because it makes it really difficult for the users and the people to implement them,” Chong stated. “And if everybody’s collaborating — like an open standard — then you actually can make a dent in the problem you see today.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Data Privacy Day.

Photo: SiliconANGLE