Why is it difficult?

Users tend to be authenticated by relatively weak tools like passwords. Two-factor authentication is stronger and recommended, but if a user has many accounts and must have a different second factor for each account, this becomes unwieldy very quickly. Corporate entities above a certain scale can afford to put extensive controls on corporate-provided devices (pads, laptops, mobiles) to protect them against intentionally or accidentally downloaded malware, as well as enforcing two-factor authentication. Most small companies and most residential users are not able to avail themselves of these protections. Moreover, the inconvenience of achieving stronger authentication protections leads to resistance or rejection by users unless enforced, e.g., by their employers. Therefore, we need robust and powerful authentication mechanisms that are triggered with little or no effort on the part of the users.

What is the impact?

Having a strong and universal authentication mechanism would allow safety to all user accounts while being easy to handle those accounts by the user. Even in industry settings, there are plenty of rules regarding the security of data and authentication of users. These rules would become easier to manage with a scalable system. With proper implementation of abstractions, the user interface would be very simple and transparent in terms of response and time to complete tasks.