Speaking at the D11 conference, Regina Dugan – the first female head of DARPA who moved to the Chocolate Factory last year – argued that with our plethora of devices, authentication needs to be simplified. The average user has to sign-on 39 times a day, and it takes them 2.3 seconds a time to do it each time – and that's if you remember the password.
To crack this, she suggests either getting tattooed or using authentication in pill form as a way of saving those precious seconds that are being so wastefully lost. The industry is still stuck with the same login technology that it has used for 40 years, she said, and Motorola has the answer – or at least the partners to provide it.
She showed off a stick-on electronic tattoo on her arm consisting of a wireless power coil, temperature, ECG, phone sensors, and a small LED with a wireless antenna border. Motorola is working with the inventors, Cambridge, Massachusetts firm MC10, on a version for authentication, she said, and they would be available in a wide variety of designs.
"It may be true that 10-20 year-olds don't want to wear a watch on their wrist, but you can be sure they'll be far more interested in wearing an electronics tattoo, if only to piss off their parents," she said. So-called theologians might disagree*.
The stick-on circuitry would last about two weeks before needing to be replaced, and the connections between the silicon and sensors are designed to flex 200 per cent, she said. The system would be sprayed with a plastic composite to assure your morning shower doesn't leave you a non-person.
Dugan also showed off a pill containing a switch and what she described as an "inside-out potato battery" that uses stomach acids as an electrolyte and causes the switch to flick on and off. The resulting "18-bit ECG-like signal" is then broadcast throughout your body for as long as the device remains in it.
Source: The Register
