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empires of the future are the empires of the mind. If Google has
its way, you could soon use an electronic ring rather than a
password to login to websites. As revealed by Wired today,
Google VP of security Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay
have outlined several ways to rethink the traditional password.
The two are responding to the problem of password security.
Passwords often don’t provide enough protection as we saw when
tech journalist Mat Honan had many of his accounts hacked last
August. “Along with many in the industry, we feel passwords and
simple bearer tokens such as cookies are no longer sufficient to
keep users safe,” Grosse and Upadhyay write in an upcoming paper
for IEEE’s Security & Privacy magazine. Two ways the Googlers
imagine changing the password? A smartphone or smart-card ring
that you wear that can authorize a new computer to give you
access to certain sites or to the machine itself. Plugging a
customized USB drive i