Remember faces, recover a password?
July 20, 2005 | 3 Comments
Last fall when I was in San Diego for the CAMP Identity Management and CAMP Enterprise Authentication Workshop put on by Educause and NMI-EDIT, I saw a very strange product demo. At the time I ignored it thinking it was a bit too strange. However for the last six months it has remained in my head.
The product is called Passfaces(tm) by the company Real User which works on what they call “cognometric authentication.” In short, you remember a bunch of faces and this allows you to get back your password if you have forgotten it, or can be used in place of the password altogether. Can you imagine clicking on 5 faces and getting logged in instead of entering a password? From my perspective, the best use would be as an alternate to ridiculously insecure questions like “What is you mother’s maiden name?”, “What’s you favorite pet’s name?”, etc.
According to Real User, the system works because:
The Passface(tm) system is based on the human brain’s remarkable ability to recognize individual faces*. This underlying principle is supported by extensive academic research and cognitive psychology experiments. Real User’s own long-term trial with Passfaces(tm) at our Web site has operated successfully for over 15,000 users - some of these returning after two years of non-use and being able to immediately recognize their passfaces.
For more detail on the science behind this, check some of their white papers. I find the technology combined with psychology here fascinating. The person giving the demo at the conference said they’d been running it for over a year without any difficulty.
Tags: authentication, identity, identity management, password, password initialization, password recovery, psychology, technology