Watchwatch-like Heartbeat Monitor to Replace Passwords

The heart beating in our chests contains in its right atrium a bundle of nerve cells and synapses known as the cardiac pacemaker. The cardiac pacemaker emits electrical impulses that cause the human heart to beat. These electrical impulses and the heart rhythm they produce can be measured by an...

DARPA, FIDO Alliance Join Race to Replace Passwords

Nearly everyone agrees that passwords are the bane of Internet security. For years, industry thinkers have somewhat vaguely referenced the need for Internet fingerprints capable of reliably verifing identities online. Yet here we are, it’s 2013 and passwords remain the primary means of...

Slideshow: Ten Weird Biometrics In Your Future

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Weird Science: 10 Forms of Biometric Authentication In the past twenty years, we’ve gone from using amber-tinted dumb terminals connected to refrigerator-sized mainframe computers to sleek tablet computers and smart phones tucked into our pockets. Despite those changes, one...

Outer Ear Authentication

The insides of our ears are a mysterious place for most of us. It turns out, however, that there’s more going on in there than we expected. In a study presented at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics in September of 2010, researchers used a shape-finding algorithm to determine ...

The Nose Knows

Researchers at Bath University have unveiled a system where noses, not fingerprints or irises, could be scanned and used for biometric authentication. Using a system called PhotoFace, first developed at the University of the West of England Bristol and Imperial College London, individuals had...

Want lunch? Palm it over

Fed up with using swipe cards and PINs for their students’ lunch payments, a school board district in Clearwater, Fla. recently partnered with microelectronic company Fujitsu to use palm vein readers for nearly half of their 102,000 students. Pinellas County School Board District spent $120,000 t...