Many of us have to manage a lot of passwords and we always find it tedious to remember all these passwords. At the D11 conference, Motorola executive (and former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency head) Regina Dugan and her team came up with a pretty innovative solution to the password problem.
One idea Motorola presented was the “vitamin authentication” pill. One of Dugan’s colleagues showed a small tablet that contains an electronic chip. After someone swallows the pill, stomach acts as an electrolyte in the chip’s battery and powers it.
The chip has a switch that turns on and off, generating an 18-bit signal like an electrocardiogram. Ones entire body would be the authentication token, just like the fobs that many office workers carry to get on corporate networks. The authentication could be activated by touch, since the human body conducts electricity — touch your phone or laptop and you’re in.
Ingestible sensors have been FDA-approved — a company called Proteus Digital Health makes the technology for medical applications, such as recording exactly when medicine is taken.
Of course, swallowing your authentication token every day would also mean passing it out of the digestive system. It also isn’t clear that is the solution appealing to consumers?
The technology is just at prototype stage, but it could be the future of password handling in your systems with improvement needed.
