However, Persona relies on public key cryptography operations performed at the browser level without the identity provider -- in this case the email provider -- being involved in the actual authentication process as with OpenID.

This means that Persona provides a greater level of privacy as the system doesn't track the activity of its users across the Web. "It creates a wall between signing you in and what you do once you're there. The history of what sites you visit is stored only on your own computer," Mozilla said on the persona.org website.

However, there are some drawbacks. While eliminating the need to remember separate usernames and passwords for every single website, Persona creates a single point of failure -- the persona.org password.

If a user's Persona password is stolen it can be used to impersonate them, Ben Adida, Persona project lead at Mozilla, said Thursday via email. "There is, of course, no way around this."

In this respect, Persona is not very different from password management applications that also rely on a master password to keep all of the user's identities protected. However, Mozilla plans to implement some additional protection mechanisms to tackle this issue.