By Andrew Blackman
Here's the fundamental problem with passwords: They are most effective in protecting a company when they are long, complicated and changed frequently. In other words, when employees are least likely to remember them.
As a result, technology companies are rushing to provide solutions that are both more secure and more convenient. Many laptops now come with built-in fingerprint readers. Smartphones and other devices, too, are opening up biometric options such as facial and voice recognition....
And, looking further into the future, researchers [School of Information professor John Chuang] at the University of California, Berkeley, are studying the use of brain waves as authentication. Test subjects in the research wore a headset that measured their brain-wave signals as they imagined performing a particular task, and the researchers were able to distinguish between different people with 99% accuracy. In theory, an imagined task like this could become a worker's "passthought."...