Facebook improves security with new Delegated Recovery tool

Facebook announced a new data recovery tool called Delegated Recovery which will allow users to recover their passwords in an easier and more secure manner. Unlike traditional password authentication and recovery, Delegated Recovery works by having two sources act as delegated vouchers for the user.

To put it in perspective, let’s take two examples: Facebook, the project initiator, and GitHub, the company with whom Facebook is trialing the feature right now. The two use encrypted tokens to communicate login attempts and user entries. One party signs the token and sends it to the other, and when a recovery is attempted, the second party countersigns the token for validation of the attempt. There are some ground rules here, such as the fact that both parties that sign the token must be valid and that the token must have been issued recently.

Promising perspective

We’ve all been in that situation where we don’t remember the login credentials to a website or platform that we frequently use or visit. It’s happening more and more often now since users entrust their web browsers of choice with the passwords they use.

The bad news starts when you perform a cache wipe or a similar operation and you end up losing the stored data including your browser’s knowledge of your passwords. Now, you have to recover your password and more than likely the respective service will send you a new one on your email address. But what if it’s an old email address you no longer use and you don’t know the password too?

This is where the new Delegated Recovery tool can come in handy and make it so that recovering a password is not only easier but safer too.

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