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‘Pass-thoughts’ As The Future Computer Login

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Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password, according to School of Information researchers. A new study explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication as a substitute for passwords.

Led by John Chuang of the UC Berkeley School of Information, the team of researchers recently introduced a way to authenticate identity via electroencephalograms (EEGs). The experimental method is termed as using a “pass-thought” instead of a text password. Using the $100 Neurosky Mindset headset, the team was able to successfully identify themselves to a computer via Bluetooth during a series of experiments.

The team determined that the most effective way to implement pass-thoughts is to ask users to perform a mental task that’s not too complicated or boring. According to tests conducted, users were bored by imagining their fingers sliding up and down to unlock something, but when they were asked to make up their own pass-thoughts, they came up with something too complicated and hard to recreate. The tasks researchers found most effective are singing a song of one’s choice, counting objects with the same color, and focusing on one’s breathing. Calibrating the headsets and using these mental tasks to serve as one’s pass-thought returned error rates of less than 1%.

The team presented their findings at the 2013 Workshop on Usable Security at the 17th international conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security in Japan in early April. While the UC Berkeley team’s method sounds very promising, more research needs to be done, and companies must be willing to make the investment in EEG-enabled headsets before pass-thoughts become widely used.

Sources: digitaltrends.com, Berkeley.edu

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