Google announced an ambitious plan aimed to replace passwords with a system that takes into account various factors called Project Abacus. Trials with “several very large financial institutions” are beginning next month, as the company says that progress with the system is going very well.
“And assuming it goes well, this should become available to every Android developer around the world by the end of the year,” said Daniel Kaufman, the head of Google’s research unit ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects).
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To recall, Project Abacus was first announced at last year’s Google I/O with the idea to ditch password-based logins in favor of a more comprehensive analysis of the way people use their phone. In practice, this means that Abacus will analyse your typing pattern, walking patterns, current location and other things to calculate the chances that you are who you say you are.
This is done through something called “Trust Score” which runs in the background to continuously fetch metrics from your device. According to the team over at ATAP, the new scoring system is cumulative and some applications may require different Trust Scores. For instance, a banking app would require a higher score than other basic app. Of course, if your score is not high enough, there is still the good old password as a fail-safe.
The project – which has been under testing with 33 universities across US last year – will begin their trials with banks starting next month. Google hopes to put the new Trust Score API into the hands of the developer by the end of the year; and it will be up to them to decide if the new metric system is reliable enough to replace the traditional password and fingerprint recognition.
(Source: Tech Crunch)
