You must be tired of entering passwords of different accounts several times. Here is a piece of good news waiting for you – Google is planning to bring Password-Free Login in favor of systems that take into account a combination of signals – like your typing pattern, walking pattern, current location, and more. Google’s new project called Project Abacus is in the beta stage and will be available to Android Developers by the end of the year.
At the Google I/O developer conference on Friday afternoon, the head of Google research unit ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects), Daniel Kaufman, offered a brief update regarding the status of Project Abacus, the name for a system that opts for biometrics over two-factor authentication.
“We have a phone and these phones have all these sensors in them, why couldn’t it just know who I was, so I don’t need a password? I should just be able to work” described Kaufman at the conference.
The Silicon Valley tech giant last year announced Project Abacus, which initially started trials with 33 universities across 28 states in the US, and the company is considering bringing banks under the umbrella.
With Project Abacus, users will be able to unlock devices or sign into applications based on the “Trust Score.” This score will be calculated by some factors such as; typing pattern, current location, speed and voice patterns, facial recognition, and other things.
Smartphone users face problems while log-in into multiple accounts, and sometimes banking and financial apps ask for OTP that are sent to a registered mobile number. The Password-Free Login moves the burden of passwords and PINs from the user to the device.
It offers a new way to secure the contents in apps; if someone doesn’t have access to your phone and is able to unlock it, all the apps could be locked down automatically. Google already has this kind of technology called “Smart Lock” on Android devices running on 5.0 and higher. The newly launched feature will compete with Apple’s fingerprint-based TouchID as around 83% of the smartphones run on the Android operating system.
