Looking for Pseudo Biometric Information
In a lifetime, people make a lot of mistakes. Some people pronounce words in a wrong way or some people might forget what other ask them to do. Even though these mistakes might cause undesirable results, one of the beauty of mistakes is that you can learn lessons from the mistakes and these lessons motivate you not to make the same mistakes.
What about security? Let’s say there is an online service that you have to type your password to log in, and due to either your weak strength password or a vulnerable system’s fault, your account was hacked by someone. What happens next? My personal experience was that the service sent me the email that says that a suspicious activity was detected, deactivated my account, and asked me to reset my password. This means that I was able to have a second chance to keep my information trying my best to create a strong password whether or not the system was vulnerable.
However, it would be a more serious problem if the password hacked was one of my biometrics. That is mainly because once biometric information is stolen by someone else, I would not be able to have another chance to change my biometric information unless I intentionally have surgery to change it. If you imagine the case where well-know biometric information used for identification or authentication such as fingerprints, iris, face, etc. is stolen, I wonder if you want to have surgery on those parts just for your password change. I would not do that.
This problem motivated me to think about what kinds of less critical but relatively unique biometric information a human has. I would call this level biometric information a pseudo biometric information. Maybe one of the well-know ways is to analyze a gait pattern of a user. This technique has been researched for a very long time (analyzing walking patterns has been studied since 1967 [1]). Even this technique was featured in the movie, Kingsman in 2015. What else? I came up with the idea that teeth arrangement might be a unique feature that an individual has. For example, you bite an apple and the system can authenticate a user by analyzing teeth mark on the apple.
Even though I am still looking for a potential way, it is challenging to find another pseudo biometric information. However, if there is a good pseudo biometric information, I believe this will open more chances for HCI researchers to think about a novel way to develop a new authentication system that reduces the possibility to lose significantly important biometric information.
[1] M. P. Murray. 1967. Gait as a total pattern of movement: Including a bibliography on gait. American Journal of Physical Medicine 8 Rehabilitation 46, 1, 290–333.
