Tag: passwords

Heartbeat could replace passwords, fingerprints

pulsePasswords, pin numbers, and credit cards could soon be a thing of the past.

Soon, your heart and your body might be used to keep track of just about everything if new technology is able to unlock “pulse passwords”.

Your heartbeat reveals more about you than your health, Bionym chief executive officer Karl Martin explained.

“There’s actually unique characteristics that relate to the size of the heart, the position of the heart, and the physiology surrounding the heart,” he said.

Our heartbeats are as unique to us as our fingerprints and now they are being used to replace passwords, key cards, and bank cards, CBS 2′s Kristine Johnson reported.

“It’s like your personal pin number is your heartbeat,” Mashable.com’s Lance Ulanoff said.

The technology could allow you to open a door without a key or have tech gadgets like smartphones and tablets unlock the second that you walk into a room. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but experts say it is the wave of the future.

“It’s going to be a way for us to interact with the world around us without having to constantly identify ourselves,” Ulanoff explained.

Bionym, a Canadian company, developed a wristband to recognize the pattern of an individual pulse. The wristband transmits information that allows the user to do things like withdrawing money without a bank card.

“You don’t have to remember anything. You don’t have to do anything special,” Ulanoff said.

Bionym isn’t the only company developing concepts that use the human body as a form of identification. Motorola is working on a temporary tattoo that contains a computer chip and an antenna.

A pill that dissolves and turns the entire body into a transmitter is also in the works.

Security experts say traditional passwords don’t offer much protection from identity thieves.

“If they’re alpha numeric, and usually they are because they have to be easy to remember, they’re also correspondingly easier to break into,” security expert Rohit Sethi explained.

The new technology could pose considerable roadblocks for hackers because heartbeats cannot be replicated.

“You’re not going to have a piece of paper in your pocket with your password. You’re going to have it as part of your body so that is safer,” Ulanoff said.

Bionym’s wristband is so in tune with its owner that if somebody did steal it, it would not work. The wristband costs about $100 and is expected to hit stores in 2014.

Have hackers made passwords obsolete?

Heather Adkins
Google manager of information security Heather Adkins

New startups looking for ways to keep their users secure should know one thing, a top Google security executive said Tuesday: “Passwords are dead.”

Speaking on a TechCrunch Disrupt panel called “Spies Like Us,” Heather Adkins, Google’s manager of information security, told moderator Greg Ferenstein that in the future, the “game is over for” any startup that relies on passwords as its chief method to secure users and their data.

Adkins, speaking alongside Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers managing partner Ted Schlein and author James Bamford, said that looking ahead, “our relationship with passwords are done,” and that “passwords are done at Google.”

She talked briefly about Google’s use of two-step authentication and the fact that the search giant has been working to innovate in the area of non-standard password security. As a result, she said, any startup that still relies on standard passwords needs to ensure that it has an abuse team set up to deal “with customers getting compromised.”

Although Adkins didn’t offer any real specifics on how Google will innovate beyond today’s security, she did say the company is experimenting with hardware-based tokens as well as a Motorola-created system that authenticates users by having them touch a device to something embedded, or held, in their own clothing. “A hacker can’t steal that from you,” she said.

Later in the conversation, which also touched on the NSA scandal, cybersecurity, and the weaponization of offensive cyber technologies, Adkins pointed out that hackers intent on making money from their bad acts had consistently found ways to exploit Google users who had yet to turn on two-factor authentication. Essentially, she explained, hackers were able to get into such users’ accounts, turn on two-factor authentication themselves, and lock the users out before utilizing those accounts to send spam. “They are finding new ways to make money off it,” she said. “Ways we hadn’t anticipated.”

Finally, Adkins argued, technology companies need to step up and build products that protect users so “they don’t rely on not getting fooled.” Ultimately, she said, anyone starting a new technology company should be sure that one person is designated to focus on security and privacy, and that one of the first 25 employees should work full time on security and privacy. – cnet.com