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![[Forget passwords, remember faces]](04lead.gif)
![[Forget passwords, remember faces]](04lead2.gif)
Lindsay Pereira
Sudhir Verma walks to the entrance of his office building. He stands before a monitor that flashes a number of faces before him, and picks five images by touching the screen. The doors swing open. And no one else can get past them.
Welcome to the next big thing in security: graphical password systems. Thanks to evolution, these passwords work by using the brain's face-recognition ability to verify identity. And they couldn't have come at a better time, too.
The Internet, today, supposedly experiences levels of fraud 19 times higher than that in the real world - all because it cannot confirm the identity of customers effectively. Add to this an estimated loss of over $500 million per year, with an increasing reluctance, on the part of customers, to part with credit card information, and you have a huge problem.
Enter Real User with Passface, a system that promises 100 per cent reliability, and requires no additional hardware or client software. Its authentication technology claims to be totally scalable, and is all set to be a global solution to identity-related problems online.
Here's how it works. Instead of our usual letters and numbers used in passwords, Passface goes for a sequence or group of human faces. Users are trained to pick and familiarise themselves with a set of faces they choose, and these graphical images are then used for authentication based on the premise that our brain remembers images a lot more easily than letters or numbers.
Passlogix is another authentication-management company using a similar graphical interface for its security systems. Instead of faces, however, it uses, for example, a virtual saloon where users can mix a particular drink to confirm identity and log on to a network.
Colourful, yes, but is it effective? You bet.
The company's v-GOTM Single Sign-On (SSO) software currently works with any Windows, Web, proprietary and host-based application, without any integration costs.
All these developments point to a future where graphical password systems
will be the order of the day, and it's easy to see why. Firstly, people tend to forget passwords involving letters and numbers, especially ones that need to be changed regularly. Graphical passwords, on the other hand, can be changed quickly, and are easily transferable, unlike biometric passwords like fingerprints.
Secondly, remembering faces is a lot easier, since we've all been doing it for as long as we can remember. Irrespective of how many faces a user is confronted with, he will always pick the ones he is most familiar with. Thirdly, for hackers, the possibility of getting the same sequence of faces are remote, to say the least.
Scepticism still prevails, of course, with some pointing out that critical situations could lead to people forgetting their faces or images. Bugs like these will have to be ironed out before these passwords hit world markets in a big way.
For the moment though, Passface is being offered online free of cost, as a consumer product with a beta version. It's got several thousand users already. What are you waiting for? Download now, and start working on those faces. They could get you through more than a few doors some day.
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