Friday, July 27, 2012

Your next mobile device will not need a password

In hindsight, this deal is fairly obvious.

I use a number of different mobile devices.  They don't all have information that I care about but some have very personal and confidential information so I take special care to protect it - using encryption and strong passwords and rotating those passwords frequently.  You  never know when you'll leave that device on an airplane or in a Starbucks.

But passwords really are a pain.  It's been years since I've been able to come up with non-repeating, reasonably mnemonic passwords that pass strength tests (e.g. mixed case, use of numerics & symbols, etc.).  Luckily I have a pretty good memory so I can use randomly generated strong passwords.  This also has the nice side effect of keeping my daughters off my iPhone :-)

Luckily, all of this will go away in favour of biometric authentication.  Years ago, I used an IBM Thinkpad which had a fingerprint scanner and it was fantastic.  I have no idea why that technology never found it's way more pervasively into laptops but I think the universal adoption of biometrics on mobile devices is a near certainty and I for one can't wait!

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