To help the Internet move on from usernames and passwords, Google wants to put a ring on it.
Google’s engineers have been experimenting with hardware that would act as a master key for online services. Examples include a smart ring for your finger, a cryptographic USB stick, or a token embedded in smartphones. Google vice president of security Eric Grosse and engineer Mayank Upadhyay outline their proposal in a research paper for this month’s IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, according to a report in Wired.
The idea is to prevent remote hackers from accessing online accounts through stolen usernames and passwords. Without physically stealing the login device, they’d have no other way to gain entry.
Some Web services already offer this type of security through two-step authentication. For instance, when you sign into Gmail on an unrecognized PC, you can have Google send a text message to your phone with a validation code. Once you enter the code, Gmail can remember that PC indefinitely.
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