A new technology called Facelock, introduced Tuesday by British researchers, could soon save us from drowning in a sea of our own forgotten passwords.
Internet users have long faced a dilemma when it comes to creating a password: make it easy to remember and it might get hacked, make it too difficult and it will be hard to remember. Facelock aims to solve this problem by foregoing the traditional alphanumeric altogether in favor of pictures,
CBS News reported.
Software engineers at the University of York published a study on the password-alternative in the
journal PeerJ, and technology enthusiasts across the internet are buzzing with excitement.
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With Facelock, users choose a few pictures of people who are familiar to them, but not well known to others. This could be a friend, family member, or even a minor celebrity other's wouldn't recognize — like one's favorite jazz trombonist. After the initial setup, each log-in attempt would present several pictures of people's faces. By selecting the correct face in a series of different photos of that person – and avoiding the faces of strangers – a secure login is successfully launched.
Rob Jenkins, lead author of the study,
said in a press release that this system is unlikely to be hacked by strangers.
"Pretending to know a face that you don't know is like pretending to know a language that you don't know – it just doesn't work," he said. "The only system that can reliably recognize faces is a human who is familiar with the faces concerned."
In the study, the researchers found that less than 1 percent of people who had no acquaintance with the password holder could guess their way through the Facelock system. People who knew the password holder could successfully log in only 6.6 percent of the time.
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