Forget FaceID, fingerprint readers; brainwaves will unlock your smartphones

Over the years we have learned that possibility of two people having the same fingerprint is impossible. That's the sole reason fingerprints are used to solve crimes and now even unlock our electronic gadgets.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that the criminologists can't trick the fingerprint system. And once someone else grabs hold of your fingerprint, what do you do then? Well, growing a new fingerprint doesn't sound like an option. As far as the fingerprint locks go, at some point in the near future, we might feel the need for a more secure authentication method.

So What would be the next big leap in biometric authentication? Well, according to Phys.org centers, a scientist named Wenyao Xu thinks the answer lies in brainwaves. Working at the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Xu developed a headset that is capable of scanning brainwaves. It determines the unique patterns a person creates while looking at images. The person's identity is confirmed within seconds and the test is unlocked.

To establish the original identity, the test subjects viewed images of celebrities and animals in rapid succession, a total four times. Subjects came back after five months to put the 'brain password' to test. Xu reported that the tests were 95 percent effective.
However, for this system to work a headset is required, which would be pretty cumbersome. It would be a hassle to put on the headset everytime you want to unlock your devices. But Xu's tests prove that brainwaves can be used as biometric identity confirmation, at least in theory.

The scientist also hopes that companies with their prime focus on security might be the early adopters of the new technology, assuming that the overall process can be simplified and made more effective. The system will be presented at MobiSys 2018, a mobile computing conference hosted in Germany by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Talking about the current methods, Fingerprint security system is not the latest one. We have seen such systems long ago where the fingerprint of a person is registered on paper using inkpad.

But due to the advancement in the technology, the same concept has been evolved to form a fingerprint scanner which we use on daily basis nowadays. Biometric is difficult to forge, it is used everywhere to secure the data further. Right from accessing any machine, smartphone till registering your attendance in office, this technology have been used everywhere. We hope the new tech makes it to smartphones quickly, making it harder to trick.