Yahoo makes passwords ‘on demand’

Yahoo is trying to make email security easy.

During the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, the tech company unveiled an “on demand” password feature, in the hopes of erasing the need to memorize one password.

{mosads}The on demand option will send users a time sensitive password through an app or text message when they want to log in. A “send my password” button will replace the usual password text box.

Yahoo Vice President Dylan Casey called it “the first step to eliminating passwords,” according to tech news site CNET.

The feature is part of the company’s broader efforts to make security and encryption easy and simple for average email users.

At the festival, Yahoo also showed an early video of its end-to-end encryption email plugin, which keeps a message locked down all the way from sender to receiver.

The California-based company is working with Google on the feature, so Yahoo email will stay encrypted when traveling to Gmail users.

The company will not automatically encrypt every email. It expects users will use the feature just for certain sensitive messages.

When turned on, the end-to-end encryption feature will ensure the email’s content is visible only to the sender and receiver, but the to/from, subject line and timestamp will remain unencrypted, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Yahoo information security chief Alex Stamos told The Washington Post the company expected to officially roll out the plugin by the end of 2015.

Tech companies have been scrambling to up security measures since government leaker Edward Snowden disclosed a range of secret government spy programs that collected wide swaths of phone and Internet data.

The revelation has driven a wedge between Washington and Silicon Valley.

Google and Apple have moved to introduce encryption into their devices that would keep government officials from accessing any data, even when armed with a warrant.   

Federal investigators argue this could create a dark zone that allows criminals to operate without fear of discovery.