Trends in authenticationRemembering faces may replace text-based passwords
The human brain has an innate ability to remember faces; companies develop access control and authentication technologies based on this innate ability
Oak Hill, Virginia-based Passfaces hopes that the human brain’s innate ability to remember faces will help it make money. Remembering faces is at the core of the technology the company is now offering as a replacement for text-based passwords. BCS reports that the technology allows users to choose three face pictures as their password, and the authentication mechanism consists of selecting the pictures from an array of seven to nine pictures. The company claims that it is far easier for humans to recollect faces than passwords. “We know a familiar face within 20 milliseconds,” claims Shaun Frome, managing director of ACAL, the U.K. distributor for Passfaces.
Also, the array of pictures which are displayed to the user are jumbled around every time they are displayed, making automated hacking tougher. You may try the technology at the Passfaces site.
Note that a similar technology (Help Net Security) demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco by Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Vidoop. Users had to select a sequence of categories such as cars, airplanes, and keys, and then they would be shown pictures of items from these categories mixed with other unrelated pictures. The user had to use the access codes obtained beside the images of their categories for authentication.
-read more on how the brain recognizes faces in Emily Singer’s Technology Review discussion
