I’ve written before about the need for password strength, and also about my love of 1Password – an app for remembering and creating strong passwords - but this, well this is something new altogether …

Regina Dugan is the former head of DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – and now works over at (Google owned) Motorola. Saying that she ‘got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA’ sounds like a great way to start a conference talk, and when she goes on to outline Motorola’s work on better ‘passwords’, it’s hard to disagree.

Two things in particular:

• An electronic tattoo that can be used to authenticate a user instead of some flimsy password. It’s made by a company called MC10 that Motorola is partnering with, and Dugan is wearing it on her own arm.
• Vitamin authentication. Dugan shows a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered with stomach acid to produce an 18-bit internal signal. After that, the swallower’s whole body becomes a password.

Wow – scary stuff. But sure, why not? Of course, electronic tattoo’s could theoretically be forcibly removed by anyone who really really wanted it – but I like the idea of vitamin authentication – I wonder how long it stays in the system? (via)