Google wants to enable passwordless logins by the end of the year
Google wants to enable login on Android devices without using a password before the end of the year. It’s called Project Abacus and it runs continuously in the background to collect certain patterns.
Those patterns function as a system to verify the user’s identity. Before it gets into the hands of developers, Google will first test the system with some ‘very large financial institutions’, Techcrunch writes following a keynote that Daniel Kaufman, the head of Google’s research institute ATAP, gave at Google I/O.
Google summarizes the patterns that the Project Abacus system uses under the ‘Trust Score’. This score is calculated from gait, location and typing, but also pay attention to specific characteristics of a person’s speech, facial recognition and other components.
If the system is not completely sure of someone’s identity, it can fall back on passwords or PINs. Also, different applications may require different Trust Scores, so a game will ask for a lower score than a banking application.
The system can also work the other way around, i.e. if someone gains unauthorized access to a phone, the system can sense that it is not the owner and make certain applications inaccessible.
The project was introduced at Google I/O in 2015 and was supposed to eliminate the need for users to enter a password or PIN. The system uses biometric data in favor of two-factor authentication.
The API that emerged from the research within Project Abacus is called the Trust API and will be tested at several financial institutions from next month. Kaufman hopes the project will be ready by the end of the year to be implemented by developers in their apps.
The system was already tested at 33 universities in the United States last year. It’s a bit like the Smart Unlock system that Google introduced at I/O last year. With Smart Unlock, an Android device can be easily unlocked if it is in a safe environment, for example based on location or in combination with bluetooth.