HAVING trouble remembering your password? Perhaps you
need to use your heart instead of your head. An encryption system that
uses the unique pattern of your heartbeat as a secret key could
potentially be used to make a hard drive that will only decrypt in
response to your touch.
Our heartbeats follow an irregular pattern that never quite repeats and that is unique to everyone. Chun-Liang Lin
at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, and
colleagues used an electrocardiograph (ECG) to extract the unique
mathematical features underlying this pattern. They then used the
information to generate a secret key that forms part of an encryption
scheme based on the mathematics of chaos theory, by which small changes
in initial conditions lead to very different outcomes.
As
a proof of concept, 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.
The work will appear in the
journal Information Sciences (DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2012.01.016).
http://www.newscientist.com/
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