Could Your Heartbeat Soon Be Used as a Secret Password?

For those who have a hard time remembering the plethora of passwords required of them, researchers have potentially come up with a password that will never leave your hand.

No, it's not a tattoo. It's your finger or palm. Rather, the heartbeat that can be sensed through your finger or palm. Researchers at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, according to New Scientist, found that an electrocardiograph (ECG) could pick up the unique beat of our hearts and translate it into a secret password. New Scientist reports that each person has a unique and irregular pattern to their heartbeat:

As a proof of concept, [Chun-Liang] Lin's system currently takes the user's ECG reading from each palm once, and a key based on that reading is stored and used for all later decryptions. He says the goal is to build the system into external hard drives and other devices that can be decrypted and encrypted simply by touching them.

Lin's experiments on the use of this technique to encrypt text and images and as a secure password was published in the journal of Information Sciences.

[H/T Gizmodo]