Your friend’s face can be your new password. :)
LONDON: A new authentication system that asks you to identify faces familiar to you could spell end of passwords. Decades of psychological research has found that humans can recognize familiar faces across a wide range of images, even when their image quality is poor. In contrast, recognition of unfamiliar faces is tied to a specific image — so much so that different photos of the same unfamiliar face are often thought to be different people. The new system, called Facelock, exploits this psychological effect to create a new type of authentication system whose details are published in the journal PeerJ. Familiarity with a particular face determines a person's ability to identify it across different photographs and as a result a set of faces that are known only to a single individual can be used to create a personalized 'lock'. Access is then granted to anyone who demonstrates recognition of the faces across images, and denied to anyone who does not. To register w