Let’s face it; remembering a bunch of passwords is the pits, and it’s just getting worse as time goes on. These days, you really ought to have a securely-generated key-smash password for everything. And at that point you need a password manager, but you still have to remember the password for that.
Well, Motorola is sympathetic to this problem, or at least they were in 2013 when they came up with the password pill. Motorola Mobility, who were owned by Google at the time, debuted it at the All Things Digital D11 tech conference in California. This was a future that hasn’t come to pass, for better or worse, but it was a fun thought experiment in near-futurism.
Dancing with DARPA
Back then, such bleeding-edge research was headed by former DARPA chief Regina Dugan. At the conference, Dugan stated that she was “working to fix the mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics” by doing things such as partnering with companies that “make authentication more human”.
Image by HeungSoon from Pixabay
Along with Proteus Digital Health, Dugan et. al created a pill with a small chip inside of it and a switch. Once swallowed, your various stomach acids serve as the electrolyte. The acids power the chip, and the switch goes on and off, creating an 18-bit ECG-like signal.
Basically, your entire body becomes an authentication token. Unlock your phone, your car door handle, and turn on your computer, just by existing near them.
It should be noted that Proteus already had FDA clearance for a medical device consisting of an ingestible sensor. The idea behind those is that medical staff can track when a patient has taken a pill based on the radio signal. Dugan said at the conference that it would be medically safe to ingest up to thirty of these pills per day for the rest of your life. Oh yeah, and she says the only thing that the pill exposes about the taker is whether they took it or not.
Motorola head Dennis Woodside stated that they had demonstrated this authentication technology working and authenticating a phone. While Motorola never intended to ship this pill, it was based on the Proteus device with FDA clearance, presumably so they could test it safely.
The story of Proteus Digital Health is beyond us here, but for whatever reason, their smart pills never took off. So we’re left to speculate about the impact on society that this past future of popping password pills would have had.
About That Government Influence
Redford and Poitier in Sneakers (1992). Image via IMDb
While it sounds sorta cool at first, it also seems like something a government might choose to force on a person sooner or later. Someone they wanted to insert behind enemy lines, perhaps, or just create an inside job that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
Taking off my tin foil hat for a moment, I’ll compare this pill with existing modern biometrics. A face scan, a fingerprint, or even
my voice is my passport, verify me are all momentary actions.With these, you’re more or less in control of when authentication happens. A pill, on the other hand, must run its course. You can’t change the signal mid-digestive cycle. Plus, you’d have to guard your pills with your life, and if a couple pills pass through you every day, you’d better have a big pillbox.
Authentication Can Be Skin Deep
Image by MC10 via Slashgear
So the password pill never came to pass, but it’s worth mentioning that at the same conference, Dugan debuted another method of physical authentication — a temporary password tattoo they developed along with MC10, a company that makes stretchable circuits and has since been acquired by a company called Medidata.
More typically, their circuits are used to do things like concussion detection for sports, or baby thermometers that continuously track temperature.
Dugan said that the key MC10 technology is in the accordion-like structures connecting the islands of inflexible silicon. These structures can stretch up to 200% and still work just fine. The tattoos are waterproof, so go ahead and swim or shower. Of course, the password tattoo never came to be, either. And that’s just fine with me.