&gt; The static password sitting in a database, is perhaps the dumbest idea anyone ever came up with for security. As soon as a resourceful (or even not terribly bright) hacker finds his or her way into the database, as we’ve learned time and time again, the passwords are sitting there for the taking, a giant treasure chest.<p>Hopefully nobody does that anymore. All passwords should be randomly salted and hashed, preferably with scrypt or bcrypt. (We use bcrypt at Userify and also sha256 in the browser before the password even crosses the wire, so we never handle your raw password.) For servers, we take the same approach: you should keep your private key <i>private</i> on your laptop -- we only want public keys.<p>Passwords are just tough to replace. They&#x27;re universal and work on almost every device. Lots of things have tried and failed to dethrone passwords, such as PIN numbers (insecure), biometrics (which are not authentication), SSL client keys (abstruse), dongles&#x2F;smart cards&#x2F;etc (expensive, inconvenient). MFA and integrations like oauth can help.<p>Fortunately, there&#x27;s a lot of interesting research going on in this area. We&#x27;ll probably always have passwords, but they&#x27;ll get stronger over time.