Patterns and face recognition to end password dilemma

Internet users may soon have a secure solution to the modern plague of passwords, in which they can use visual patterns or even their own body parts to identify themselves.

Developers at the world’s biggest hi-tech fair, CeBIT, in Germany’s northern city of Hanover, say that one of the biggest frustrations of having a smartphone and a computer is memorising dozens of sufficiently airtight passwords for all their devices and accounts.

“The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords,” said Steven Hope, managing director of Winfrasoft from Britain.

“They all have to be different, no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don’t work in the real world today.”

As millions of internet users have learned, no password is safe when hackers can net them en masse from banks, email services, retailers or social media websites that fail to fully protect their servers.

Many throw in the towel and use no-brainer codes like “123456” and “password” — which are still the most common despite how easily they can be cracked, CeBIT spokesman Hartwig von Sass said.

Winfrasoft has developed an alternative using a four- colour grid with numbers inside that resemble a Sudoku puzzle. Users select a pattern on the grid as their “password” and because the numbers inside the boxes change once per minute, the code changes too, making it far harder to hack.

“There is no way anybody could see which numbers you are looking at. You see typing numbers but you don’t know what the pattern is because each number is here six times,” Hope said during a demonstration.

Biometric data offers another alternative to numbers, letters and symbols.

Apple equipped its latest generation iPhone with a fingerprint reader to boost its security profile. But a group of European hackers, the Hamburg-based Chaos Computer Club, showed the system could be pirated using a sophisticated “fake” fingerprint made of latex.

Japan’s Fujitsu has developed an identification system based on each person’s unique vein pattern.

Swiss firm KeyLemon has developed a face recognition system using a webcam. The computer registers parts of the face, “the eyes, the eyebrows, the shape of your nose, your cheekbones, the chin,” said a company spokesman. “Face recognition and fingerprint recognition are additional safety security features, they will never have only face recognition or fingerprint recognition” but rather use them as a crucial backup to passwords.