Forget passwords - the future of digital security lies in biometrics
The advent of so-called biometric authentication threatens to kill off passwords for good. But which technology will be adopted is still anyone's guess
They're calling it Identity 3.0. For decades the alphanumeric password has been the bane of internet users digital lives, but the days of having to memorise letters and numbers on a keyboard could soon be over.
Luxe smartphones already have built-in thumbprint scanners, while Apple Watch and many other wearables can detect a wearer's heartbeat. Cameras and sensors can recognise a person by their face, ears, voice or even the pattern of the veins in their hands. The age of so-called biometric authentication is almost upon us, and it threatens to kill off the alphanumeric password for good.
Some of the concepts are wacky. PayPal recently floated the idea of "edible verification", encrypted ingestible devices that could store personal data, as well as silicon chips that could be embedded into a person's skin to identify the unique characteristics of their body to a computer. Neither idea is beyond the concept stage.
However, the tech that will power Identity 3.0 is real and it's ready. Which approach can most easily replace alphanumerics is anyone's guess, although in Hong Kong there is momentum behind face recognition technology. The Legislative Council's security panel revealed in January that it would spend HK$2.9 billion on smart biometric ID cards capable of storing higher resolution images for face recognition. The chip in the current ID cards - some nine million of them - currently holds fingerprint images, though there have been concerns about their quality. The new cards will have more storage capacity and a microchip that can also hold images of the owner's face with plenty of room to add, in future, iris images and fingerprint data. The new cards will be phased in from 2018 to 2022.
Many see a future for face recognition tech in wider society. It's being pioneered in vehicles by Canberra, Australia-based Seeing Machines, which hit the headlines earlier this year with its Fovio "accident avoidance" tech employed on an F-Type Jaguar, which monitors drivers for fatigue and distraction. For now, it concentrates on industrial truck drivers, but mainstream vehicles are next. The same eye-tracking tech, combined with iris scanners, could also be used to start vehicles, open doors or unlock a website or app.
Although it's barely on the agenda in Europe or the US, basic biometrics is on the cusp of mass adoption in Asia. Fingerprint verification is commonly used for ATMs in Japan and banks in Vietnam are trialling the same technology so customers can make a transaction without using any kind of card, identification or smartphone.