Project Abacus from Google: biometrics instead of a password

The correspondence of the process of authentication of users of various services and devices with the help of the login / password bundle to the current needs and wishes of the users themselves is a big question. There are also a lot of discussions devoted to finding possible alternatives for a username and password on the web, both among ordinary people and high-class technical specialists.

Google has decided to offer its own authentication method, which does not use the usual form with a proposal to enter your data. Now the company's specialists are working on a project called Project Abacus. The Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) team is working on the project. As part of the project, developers are trying to find a reliable way to authenticate the user using biometrics. And this is not about fingerprints, the project is more universal.

In order to pass the identification procedure, users need only ... a smartphone. It is this device that reads the various behavioral features of the user, analyzing the information received, and comparing with the standard (Google collects a bunch of user data). Here are features of typing, and voice analysis, plus the study of the environment (for example, the presence of bluetooth beacons, bluetooth devices closest to the user, which occur in the same place for a long time - at work, for example, colleagues' smartphones). After analyzing the information, the telephone in the algorithm Abacus displays "trust points". The higher the score, the more likely that the smartphone is in the hands of the owner. The maximum score is 100, the minimum score is 1.
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In addition to the above criteria for determining the authenticity of the user, additional data may be used. This image of the user's face, analysis of the features of his walk and some other data.



If the authentication is successful, the user is allowed into that or another program. In addition, for each application, "confidence score" is different. Thus, a banking application requires a very high score, and a game application or social network can be satisfied with a slightly lower result.

The developers claim that this method is 10 times safer than a fingerprint scanner.

Unfortunately, it is not yet known when Google will talk more about technology, it is all the more unknown when (and if) Project Abacus will become a reality. Perhaps the new project will tell on Google I / O 2016.