Simply using your smartphone could become a new type of password

Fingerprint scanning is great and all, but we’re not done searching for an alternative to traditional passwords that’s both easier to use and more secure. A new research project known as ActivPass, which is being worked on by researchers across the globe, may have found a viable alternative that asks you questions about what you’ve done today rather than using a traditional password. 

Before you read this story, try to answer the following question: Who was the first person to text you today? Even if you can’t remember, you can keep reading. But a group of researchers think that kind of question could eventually work as a simpler log-in method for some websites and services. The kinds of things you do regularly on your smartphone or computer may be easy for you to recall but difficult for a hacker to guess, they suggest. In a research project dubbed ActivPass, researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in West Bengal, India, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studied how well participants could answer questions based on a log of activity, including Facebook posts, websites visited, songs downloaded, and people called and texted.