Marshall Brain's Blog

The previous post prompted a lot of email, with friends sending in a number of different techniques. The one that seems the most logical for authenticating someone both in person and over the phone is a voice print, probably combined with one or more random questions to avoid the use of recordings. There were even reports last week of a Credit card that uses voice authentication.

One of the more interesting new techniques for authentication uses pictures, and the human ability to remember pictures:

Steganography strikes back

The idea is that you click on different areas of a picture to authenticate yourself. To set your password, you choose a picture and several different spots on the picture that you will click. People are much better at remembering spots on a picture than they are with remembering strings of random letters.

Neither of these techniques are in widespread use right now. It will be interesting to see how long it takes.