Frontline workers across industries are finding workarounds to authentication that lead to security risks—behaviors that impact the manufacturing industry the most, according to a recent report. 

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"Authentication friction”—when employees divert their attention from work to authenticate into applications or systems through verification or password reset—causes frontline workers to find workarounds such as dangerous password sharing, according to Frontline Friction: The State of Authentication in Frontline Workers from two groups, Imprivata, a Boston-area digital identity, authentication, and access management company, and the FIDO Alliance, an industry association launched in 2013 to create phishing-resistant authentication standards that reduce reliance on passwords.  

Key findings from their report include:  

• Authentication friction is delaying frontline work: 34% of manufacturers said authentication difficulties have delayed frontline work.  

• "Legacy" technology is adding to authentication challenges: Among manufacturing organizations where unique credentials aren't consistently used, 41% cited endpoints or applications that don't support suitable authentication methods.   

• Security friction is driving risky behavior: Manufacturing reports the highest rate of credential sharing (38%) among the industries the two groups surveyed. Manufacturing IT/security decision-makers also are more concerned about AI-enabled impersonation (51%) than conventional social engineering (48%).   

• Manufacturing is moving toward authentication that doesn't utilize passwords: 29% of manufacturing organizations use passkeys today, with 28% prioritizing them over the next two years.  

In a typical month, organizations estimated that over 30% of their frontline workers are hit by authentication issues when logging into their systems or applications, with each affected worker losing around 2.5 hours each month to repeated interruptions. 

This friction can come from many different places such as account lockouts, password resets, and repeated MFA prompts, according to the report. 

And 95% of organizations observed frontline workers using workarounds like staying logged in, sharing credentials and bypassing controls, adding risk to complex environments. About 60% of decision-makers cited confirmed or suspected attempts to misuse account resets and social-engineer service desks. 

Consequences for many manufacturers 

The report found manufacturing is hit the hardest by the consequences of authentication friction, and workers in manufacturing industries face more authentication friction than others.  

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"In areas of manufacturing, it's more likely to have shared workstations. If you have shared workstations, you need to switch out who's the user as they're logging in. Obviously manufacturing is not unique in that situation, but it is more prevalent there,” added Frank Balonis, who is chief information security officer and senior VP of operations at a cybersecurity software vendor, Kiteworks, and an industry expert who Smart Industry often calls upon to address important cybersecurity issues.

“There's definitely more friction if in the same shared system, you have multiple users switching back and forth.”  

To reduce this friction, frontline employees find workarounds like staying logged into systems, which creates “an opening in which if someone wanted to do something malicious, they're not logged in as themselves,” Balonis said.   

“As someone who's always thinking about security, insider threat is also still something you always have to consider as a problem as well.”  

'Passwordless is the future' 

In manufacturing, threat activity increased by almost 250% as of April 2026, leading companies to search for ways to reduce authentication friction so workers are less likely to resort to risk-inducing workarounds. 

Balonis championed phish-resistant, passwordless authentication, making it easier for users to authenticate and therefore less likely to use workarounds. "Passwordless is the future, and the sooner you can get there, the better."

Joel Burleson-David, chief technology officer at Imprivata, echoed this advice.

"You can put things in place to prevent credential sharing or session reuse. But if you do that and add additional friction or burden, the users will then find yet another way to circumvent the process or the system," he said, citing passwordless authentication and facial biometrics.  

Imprivata’s report with FIDO Alliance also found that faster switching between users and devices is the top reported passwordless benefit in manufacturing. For the manufacturing industry, Burleson-Davis said that fingerprinting is often not applicable but facial biometrics and phishing-resistant passkeys can serve as effective passwordless methods.  

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However, he emphasized, organizations should be wary of a behavior change before implementing different authentication methods and to consider whetherthe change will not only decrease workarounds but also increase security.  

"You have to be really mindful about the behavior change and what that really means for the end-user workflow. Are you going to be able to reduce the authentication friction at the same time that you increase the security? If not, you're going to find yourself sort of in a similar battle." 

AI 'chicken-or-the-egg' problem  

As AI continues to accelerate security breaches, Burleson-Davis saidthis creates an "ever-extending attack surface." Manufacturers already face higher rates of ransomware attacks, compounding the issue. 

He added that identity lifecycle attacks are also increasing as AI breaches VPNs and security advisor firewalls that lead into plants. He said he has also seen a lot of "sophisticated social engineering" through attacking the credential lifecycle.

As identity has become so central to you know logging to shared equipment and privileged systems, individual password authentications have become increasingly important. However, this is also the type of authentication friction that leads users to find workarounds. 

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"This creates a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Identity is being attacked, so a bunch of IT divisions are implementing security controls, often without thinking about the workforce that makes [it harder to authenticate, leading to workarounds] that increases the risk," Burleson-Davis said.  

He said that going passwordless not only solves this problem but creates benefits as well. Less authentication friction leads to better work environments, improved business, and increased worker productivity, according to the Imprivata/FIDO Aliance report.  

"We [will not] only minimize this downside of being breached across this identity cycle, but we can also make our workforce and our frontline workers more effective," Burleson-Davis said. "There's very few opportunities where you get a win-win like that."