Technology that uses your body as your password
Cybersecurity is feeling ever more insecure, with hackers able to steal your digital identity to access your personal information. But now companies are investigating ways to use your actual identity -- your very biology -- as your unbreakable key into your own devices.
True Key, by Intel, is a password manager that uses facial recognition. You can't get into your device until it recognizes your face. Then, it fills in your passwords for different sites so you don't have to remember them.
The technology measures over 100 different points on the face. Importantly, it can tell the difference between your actual face and a picture or video of you, and also accounts for changing hairstyles, facial hair, and whether or not you're wearing your glasses.
Facial recognition is also coming to home security and monitoring cameras such as ArcSoft's Simplicam. You register different people's faces, and when the camera detects one of them -- or an unfamiliar face -- it will send you a customized alert.
Other technologies are using what's on the inside, not the outside. The Nymi band reads your electrocardiogram (ECG), the electrical current your heart generates, to unlock your computer without a password.
"It's the unique characteristics that are within your ECG that's what we use to actually create our algorithm. That's what we use to create the digital signature," Nymi's Shawn Chance told Kara Tusboi of CNET.com.
With products like these appearing on the market, we could be moving from a password-protected world to one in which all you need to unlock your life is yourself.