Jonathan LeBlanc, the head of Global Developer Advocacy at PayPal,
thinks that as long as systems rely on a username/password structure
to identify people, some folks are inevitably going to set their
password to, well, "Password" (or "12345" or "qwerty") and end
up compromising their security, reports the Wall Street Journal.
His solution? To Kill All Passwords, as the title of a presentation he's been taking through the rounds of tech conferences aptly puts it.
Technological advances mean that the doors have opened to "true
integration with the human body," LeBlanc says. Though fingerprint
scanning and other "external" identifiers are getting a lot of talk,
really the future is inside us — in identifying our vein structure,
for example, or our heartbeat's unique electrical signature.
Sensors in our skin or our brains could detect some property of our
physical selves and communicate it to “wearable computer tattoos."
Systems like these could “put users in charge of their own security,”
LeBlanc said.
Data would be encrypted to protect against hacking, LeBlanc said.
"I ground a lot of my talks in reality, but toward the end of the presentation things get a little strange."
