Tek-Bull

Scientist are Developing a Device to Unlock your Computer with your Heartbeat

Anonymous made a very good point when they said that all passwords are hackable. You can’t ever really be 100% secure, passwords are a problem that for the most part, will never go away. It doesn’t matter how secure, long, or protected you believe your password is, if a hacker really wants to get into a webpage or system, given enough time, they will manage to break into it. But if a group of researchers have it their way, some day we may have a password that is unique to each one of us and the only way to hack it is by taking our heart.

The researchers are playing around with the idea of using the human heart beat and associating the beat with an encryption key, by taking your heart’s ECG reading from a person’s hand, they can extract the signature beat of the heart and generate the password needed to unlock your device.

This should be ultra-secure, in theory, but what happens if you’re running or you’re minutes away from turning in your midterm paper but your heart is racing because of how nervous you are? Well, according to Chun-Liang Lin from the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, the human heart never repeats the same pattern. The encryption scheme is based on a very sophisticated math algorithm that can figure out when the user is the right user based on missed beats, length of beats, and other small tale tale signs.

The goal is to build the system into hard drives that will use a device to detect your heart beat almost instantaneously to unlock your device. Via NewScientist