Google’s Motorola Proposes Tattoos And Pills To Replace Passwords

Google and its Motorola division have come up with some innovative yet scary ideas on how to fix the world’s password woes, proposing tattoos and pills for truly effective authentication.

The ideas were shown off by Regina Dugan, former DARPA head and lead for advanced research at Motorola, during the D11 conference. “We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA,” she told the crowd, presenting an electronic tattoo to them.

Motorola’s mad ideas

Produced by a company called MC10, the tattoo, as worn by Dugan herself, would not be permanently attached to the user’s skin – it appears to be more of a Near Field Communications patch than a tattoo.

It has an antenna and some sensors embedded into it, and Motorola wants to work with MC10 to add authentication credentials to the technology.

Dugan suggested youngsters would be more than happy to wear an electronic tattoo, “as long as it doesn’t piss off their parents”.

The pill idea is more radical. Again produced on stage, Dugan said the pill contained a small chip with a switch and a battery, which uses stomach acids to serve as an electrolyte to power it up.

“The switch goes on and off, and it creates an 18-bit ECG-like signal in your body and essentially your entire body becomes your authentication token,” she explained.

“When I touch my phone, my computer, my door, my car – I’m authenticated.

“It’s my first superpower… I want that.

“I take a vitamin every morning, what if I could take vitamin authentication?”

The pill is created by a company called Proteus Digital Health and has been cleared by the US Federal Drug Administration. Dugan noted such ideas would not be making it to market anytime soon, however. Below is a diagram from Proteus on how its tech works:

Password problems

The world is getting tired of the old username and password paradigm of authentication. That’s largely because hackers have proven adept at breaking poor defences to pilfer login information.

And password crackers are getting awfully good at breaking encryption commonly used by Internet services, thanks to the number of guesses they can make backed by high-powered GPUs.

“After 40 years of advances in computation, we’re still authenticating basically the same way we did years ago. In fact, it has gotten worse… because the average user does it 39 times a day,” Dugan added.

So any innovation is welcome, no matter how creepy, said Per Thorsheim, password expert and security consultant.

“If we didn’t have anyone in this world who dared to be different, to innovate and spend money on basic research that most probably will never be commercialised, we wouldn’t be where we are now. You really should fail a couple of times before you succeed,” Thorsheim told TechWeekEurope.

“I’ve seen way too many companies dropping out on R&D, outsourcing or just deciding that it’s too costly. In the long run I think many of them will realise that wasn’t a good idea.

“Any company who dares to do this kind of research gets two thumbs up from me.”

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