If you’ve ever had your smartphone hacked you know just how panic inducing it can be. Sadly, that four digit iPhone lock code isn’t always as unbreakable as you might have hoped. Phones of the future though won’t rely on codes, they’ll rely on your fingerprints instead.
Most of us use some sort of four didget code to lock our phones, maybe it’s your birthday, your spouse’s birthday or your address. That right there is one of the main problems. If the person who’s trying to hack your phone knows anything about you, you’re making their job 10x easier by using some sort of personal four diget number. The second issue is that while a four-digit PIN has around 10,000 possibilities, a large portion of us are using the same codes — 2233 or 4321 might be easy to remember, but they’re also easy to crack.
Biometrics, the practice of identifying somebody through physical characteristics would drastically cut down on the risk of smartphone security breaches. Fingerprints and retinal scanning are two of the ways that might combat somebody hacking into your phone of the future.
Fingerprinting isn’t new by any means so using it to secure smartphones is really a no-brainer. Optical scanning would use a digital camera to measure the minute differences between electrical stimuli in the ridges of your fingerprint and 3D scanning would basically make a digital map of your fingerprint. Not only would this eliminate the need to remember another pin, but it would be much more difficult for a hacker to unlock your phone. (Just don’t go giving out fingerprint samples to total randos.)
So how about retinal scanning though? It’s been done in sci-fi movies for years, so why not slap that puppy on the iPhone 6? The way it works is your retina is a thin layer of tissue in the back of your eyeball that works like a camera lens and requires a set of blood vessels to feed it. That blood vessel configuration is unique to each person and the retina scan uses a low-energy infrared light to capture a unique map of the retina. Pretty cool, eh? The obvious downside is having to stick your eye into a camera on your phone every time you get a text. Also, the technology for retina scans doesn’t quit fit into phones yet.
While biometric technology will be on your phone sooner rather than later and protect it from physically being hacked, it also raises the issue of personal security. That’s right, all those big companies that the government is pulling the strings on will just add your retina scan and fingerprints to a database. Your phone might be protected but your personal identity might no longer be personal, and that’s the scary part.
Via Popsci